unix

This book is a fine reference for POSIX threads. It will teach you the why's and how's of thread programming with illustrative examples. It will also tell you about the choices that were made for the threads standard. Finally, it acts as a reference book for the POSIX threads standard.

The book delivers what you would expect from a book on POSIX threads, nothing more, nothing less.

This book provides the clearest, most concise, and most authoritative treatment of POSIX threads that I have seen. The author is a recognized expert and explains how and why Pthreads operates as it does. I approached this book with some fundamental misunderstandings and concerns with respect to Pthrreads, and, after reading a few chapters, everything became clear, obvious, and natural. Furthermore, the author avoids the mistakes, important omissions, and misleading statements that are common in many other multithreading books and articles. The example programs provide additional insight, and the solutions can be used to solve many practical problems.

Chapter 8 ("How to Avoid Debugging") is a classic and provides sound advice; I often recommend this chapter to Windows programmers as the advice applies to all multithreaded systems, not just Pthreads. Numerous deadlocks, race conditions, and other all too common bugs can be avoided after a careful reading of this chapter.

The author is active in the comp.programming.threads discussion group, and his thorough and thoughtful responses, similar to the explanations in the book, have helped to clear up numerous misunderstandings.

Richard Kirk's review below is the most accurate. There are many annoying things about this book. In addition, I find the code suspicious. For example the examples he gives of mutexes is to associate them with data items, even though the vast majority of the time they're associated with executable code. The discussion of critical sections is basically non-existent with very little explanation of the equivalent functionality in Pthreads. His explanation of semaphores is very difficult to follow and far more complex than it need be. I found better and simpler tutorials on the Web.

Butenhof is at his best when explaining the deep stuff and the subtle aspects of parallel programming. If this is what you need, the book is great. But if you want someone to show you how to use Pthreads and enable you to get up to speed quickly, then you will find this book rather frustrating.

The absence of downloadable code is an additional frustration. I'd go with the books by Bil Lewis, which are more straightforward and he offers tons of downloadable examples.