Book review: Concurrent Programming on Windows

I’ve finished reading this excellent book written by Joe Duffy. Yes, it’s a bit big and it mixes theory with practice (which might not be what you want). Due to that, I think that it’s a little bit difficult to define the target audience of this book (they probably tried to make it a pleasant read to everyone and we all know how that tends to end…).

Having said that, I believe that you should buy this book if you’re doing windows development. It provides great coverage of all the stuff you need to know in order to write effective multithreaded code. Even though you should read the book from cover to cover (ok, I know…it’s really a huge book!), you can also use it as a reference book.

Before giving my classification, I think that there are some gotchas with this book. For instance, I looked several times at the cover to check if this was really an Addison&Wesley book. I’m sorry, but A&W made me used to getting absolutely correct texts and that doesn’t happen in this book. There were several sentences that I had to read several times because they simply didn’t make sense (and it seems like I wasn’t the only one to complain about this problem). Despite those problems, I’m still giving it a final note of 9/10.