Pthreads Programming: A POSIX Standard for Better Multiprocessing (O'Reilly Nutshell)

Author: Bradford Nichols, Dick Buttlar, Jacqueline Proulx Farrell
List Price: $34.95
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ISBN: 1565921151
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates (01 September, 1996)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 68,803
Average Customer Rating: 3.29 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

Rating: 2 out of 5
o'reilly should be embarrased!!
I read the book a number of years ago to learn pthreads.
I found numerous errors in the examples -- speaking
at work to a colleague I recall we laughed at this book --
It was such a disaster.

I may read the book again (over the last few years I learned a lot about
pthreads) and give a careful analysis of it.

I had a first printing -- there were gobs of errata on
Oreilly's site -- maybe they put in enough corrections so
the examples run -- but I'm amazed how shoddy the first printing was.

Stay away from it...


Rating: 4 out of 5
Pretty Good
I found it too be an excellent overview. Its treatment of the issues associated with threads and signals I think was especially useful. My only complaint is with the Quick Reference in Appendix C. The reference provides no description of possible function call errors. While I admit the errors are dependant on the particular Pthreads implementation, however there are a core number of errors that would be common throughout all, or at least most, implementations. The point is if you are to do any actual programming, which I presume is the reason for a reference of function calls, you need to know what return values to expect. Providing no reference would have been better then providing a useless one.


Rating: 3 out of 5
Not the best effort I've read...
The short code snippets are horrible. If the author wants to save money and space by using code snippets, it should be checked and checked again for accuracy. There are numerous errors in the code. For example, on page 80, there is an example of condition variable usage. However, there are no function prototypes! This is just one of numerous obvious ommissions. Trust me, there are non-obvious errors too. If you're looking for an overview, this will do you fine. However, if you're looking for some decent code examples to look at, I'd suggest Butenhof's book instead.

Multi-threaded programming is difficult enough, why make it harder for yourself?

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