Grokking Concurrency

It's a great book with fantastic illustrations. These are fundamental concepts to create software that scales. The book illustrates theory with real-life examples and practical ideas. The author does a great job simplifying complex concepts. Give it a try and learn how to build great software.

My husband had this to say about this book: "The book really breaks down the concepts of Concurrency in easy to understand terms. I don't know if there is a better resource out there currently. I have tried for years to understand what makes a concurrency a great technique to use/learn and this book I feel answered that question for me. You owe it to yourself to get a copy of this book if you find yourself in the same boat as me."

This book does much to demystify concurrency, which, as the author notes, seems to be treated as some sort of Hidden Knowledge that is to be made available only to a select few. Happily, it is generally free of the typos and vague or contradictory language common in computer texts. The notable exception is the output shown in chapter 4 for child_processes.py. Lines like "Parent : Child's PID: 73554" appear , which is interesting since no such print() call exists in the code, and even if it did, it would be useless. Unlike fork(), the Process class does not give immediate access to the child's PID - there is no such thing as a getcpid() system call. To prove that concurrency deserves its rather murky reputation, I ran the Chapter 8 program race_condition.py in Google Colab, and the output was what would be expected if no race condition existed. There is call to setswitchinterval() that is noted to be key to getting interruptions, so I both increased and decreased the value of THREAD_DELAY, but the problem that there was no problem persisted. There is one issue with Python that was a little annoying. Basically, the typing module is obsolete, as its functionality is largely found in collections.abc. You often see "import typing as T" in the text. It could be replaced - if necessary - with "import collections.abc as C". I stress "if" because in recent Python versions, built-in types can be used directly in type hints. So, "from typing import List" becomes extraneous, as "list" will now work where "List" was once needed.

I hesitate to use the word simple with this book, but it is the one that fits best. And it is the right approach to take with a topic that has grown over the years to be as complex as it is. Given a language that supports concurrency, which approach should you take? Read this and then decide with understanding in hand. A good and pleasurable read!

This book is very accessible. While I have a masters degree in computer science from a top institution, it was mostly focused on data science and machine learning and I had never gotten around to studying concurrency at all. This book was my introduction & I love it!

This is a gem of a book which provides a good foundation on the concepts for and of concurrency though examples from the real world together with code examples to illustrate the concepts more.