Java Threads, 2Ed (O'Reilly).pdf

Preface When Sun Microsystems released the first alpha version of Java™ in the winter of 1995, developers all over the world took notice. There were many features of Java that attracted these developers, not the least of which were the set of buzzwords Sun used to promote Java: Java was, among other things, robust, safe, architecture-neutral, portable, object oriented, simple, and multithreaded. For many developers, these last two buzzwords seemed contradictory: how could a language that is multithreaded be simple? It turns out that Java's threading system is simple, at least relative to other threading systems. This simplicity makes Java's threading system easy to learn, so that even developers who are unfamiliar with threads can pick up the basics of thread programming with relative ease. But this simplicity comes with trade-offs: some of the advanced features that are found in other threading systems are not present in Java. However, these features can be built by the Java developer from the simpler constructs Java provides. And that's the underlying theme of this book: how to use threading tools in Java to perform the basic tasks of threaded programming, and how to extend them to perform more advanced tasks for more complex programs.