Reasonable Presentation

This is the only book on Java concurrency that I have read, so I cannot compare it to others such as Brian Goetz's book. My overall impression is that the general methodology for designing concurrent programs with Active/Passive objects and state diagrams is well presented. I think some of the java code in the book, though, is becoming a bit dated and no longer best practice given the concurrency features, and other things such as Enums, added in Java 5. The book relies heavily on the wait/notify implementation. As far as I know there is no errata for the book and although I didn't see anything major there are a few errors that would benefit from being documented. There is also sometimes a tendency to confuse "principal" and "principle".

I'm not sure what the other reviewer is saying about the book's layout. Any programming text is going to have code spread across multiple pages. One thing, though, is that each program and figure is labeled as both that, as well as with an "exhibit" number. This seemed unnecessarily redundant.

I think a lot of work went into the book, but I think it could now benefit from a second edition. Without that, you probably want to look at some of the other books with more recent publication dates before making your decision.

Other Reviews

• Reasonable Presentation
• Good book, questionable topic coupling and poor printing
• Great introduction to concurrent programming with objects