More than ever, learning to program concurrency is critical to creating
faster, responsive applications. Speedy and affordable multicore
hardware is driving the demand for high-performing applications, and you
can leverage the Java platform to bring these applications to life.
Concurrency on the Java platform has evolved, from the synchronization
model of JDK to software transactional memory (STM) and actor-based
concurrency. This book is the first to show you all these concurrency
styles so you can compare and choose what works best for your
applications. You'll learn the benefits of each of these models, when
and how to use them, and what their limitations are.
Through hands-on exercises, you'll learn how to avoid shared mutable
state and how to write good, elegant, explicit synchronization-free
programs so you can create easy and safe concurrent applications. The
techniques you learn in this book will take you from dreading
concurrency to mastering and enjoying it. Best of all, you can work with
Java or a JVM language of your choice - Clojure, JRuby, Groovy, or
Scala - to reap the growing power of multicore hardware.
If you are a Java programmer, you'd need JDK 1.5 or later and the Akka
1.0 library. In addition, if you program in Scala, Clojure, Groovy or
JRuby you'd need the latest version of your preferred language. Groovy
programmers will also need GPars.
