Brief comments on the book "Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks - When Threads Unravel"

This is a book by Paul Butcher and published by "The Pragmatic Programmers" with a copyright of 2014.

I give this book a great big "Good Job"!

This was 1 of 2 books which were recent impulse purchases. I mostly work with web applications and integrations but generally don't have many explicit concurrency and/or parallelism needs not handled by standard frameworks. I enjoy keeping up with technical topics though so this seemed like an appropriate topic.

I really enjoyed this book.  It is both well written and edited. If you don't work with concurrency and/or parallel systems regularly then you will probably learn some new things.  Even if you do work with them - you may find something new and interesting since the book covers a decent breadth of technology.

On the publishers website, there is a bonus chapter "Actors in Scala" which I just finished reading (just google for the main book title and Scala).  I found this somewhat more practical than the chapter 5 that made it to press which covers Actors using a new language named Elixir.

Overall, I learned/relearned a few things regarding the tools available in the java.util.concurrent package.  I also learned a lot of interesting concurrency stuff about Clojure, OpenCL, Exlir, Scala, Actors and other topics. I'm hoping to find/make a little time to toy with some of the ideas and technology discussed in the book now.  Maybe I can implement concurrent versions of some programs I wrote as learning examples for my kids. This book does inspire me to go and learn more on many of the topics.

Hope you found this useful.

Have a blessed day!
Scott

[2016/05/28]Was trying to give OpenCL a tryout on my (pretty old) Toshiba Satellite but am having driver problems.  My initial plan was to try it out with the embedded Intel HD graphics but when that turned out problematic. My fallback plan was to try and use just CPU support but I received some errors with drivers for that as well. I'm trying hard not to turn my laptop in a brick right now so I may have to borrow my wife's laptop for a minute or maybe the kids desktop computers would work OK for a quick test if the driver install goes OK. We are talking about getting a nicer small server class system for trying out some things (including stuff like this in my case) - that might be the best plan.