Product Description

This book aims to address one of the fundamental units of .NET programming - the thread. A strong understanding of the role threads play in program execution, how multiple threads can interact in order to make efficient programs, and the pitfalls to beware of when developing multithreaded applications, are all core to a developer's ability to develop effective VB.NET programs. This book will cover how .NET applications are executed, the lifecycle of a thread in .NET, how the .NET framework uses threads, how threads work in an event-driven environment, how we can create threads, how we can avoid race conditions and deadlocks, how the activity of multiple threads can be synchronized, and how to debug multithreaded applications.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1141698 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 350 pages

From the Publisher
We are aware of a small coding error, the corrected code and support files can be found on the Wrox website. We offer full support for all our tiles.

Threads are fundamental to the way GUI and server applications operate - if your code is running in a GUI, then you're already writing code in a threaded environment. If your code runs in an ASP.NET page, then you're already running in a threaded environment. This book aims to cover the tricky issues of threading in .NET, and particularly to do so from the perspective of VB.NET developers. Threading is by nature not easy to grasp, but a necessary step towards mastery of the .NET platform.

Customer Reviews

With better examples it would have earned more stars
Currently this is the only .NET book that addresses Threading and nothing else. Furthermore, it targets VB developers and as such, it is bound to be a success (although apart from the code listings there isn't much VB-specific about it). It deserves the handbook title as it comes in 240 smaller than A4 pages and I think it is good value for money. It must be said that there isn't much in the Threading namespace that isn't covered in the book, although not all classes/methods get the same coverage and the book could have been even smaller in my opinion.

It is divided in 7 chapters. The first chapter is a good introduction to threading but a lot more could be said on AppDomains. The second & third chapters are the core of the book introducing the threading namespace, the Thread class along with almost all of its methods and the synchronization techniques available (Monitor, ReadWriterLock, Manual and AutoResetEvent, Mutex and Interlocked). This is all good stuff and if it weren't for the very basic examples, it would be excellent.

Chapter 4 is titled Design Patterns but don't get your hopes high. Not only it does not include design patterns (according to the common definition of the term) but it discusses the STA & MTA threading models in such a way that the reader may be left confused. This includes factual errors and bad grammar. It then usefully introduces 3 threading models (Main & Worker, Peer, and Pipeline models) but they are really let down by the respective accompanying examples. The (many) authors have tried to describe a single code example by retrofitting the 3 models to it each time; they should have introduced a different example per threading model as applicable.

Chapter 5 describes the Thread Pool and makes good reading. I was looking forward to the 6th chapter on debugging/tracing threads but there was only a generic description of debugging for VS.NET, which in my opinion, could have been omitted altogether. The book ends with a complete example that uses the classes from the Net namespace.

Besides any criticism you find above and the 3 star rating that reflects the quality of the work, I do recommend this book to .NET developers who are new to threading.

I like it
I didn't know anything about threading. I had heard about it, but didn't know anything about it. This book started off very good and described what threading was, how it's used in the new version of Visual Basic, when to use it, and how to use it.

Nice book, but some of code has errors
The book is very good. Especially the Synchronization and the Scalability chapters. Chapter 1 is fine, but the code in chapter 1 is not edited properly. The editors haven't done a good job in correcting gramatical errors. But, I recommend this book if you want to learn threading in .Net. This book has some good end-to-end examples that show the importance of threading.