Taming Java Threads by Allen Holub (Apress)

This book is for the experienced Java developer who has a solid understanding of the basics of threads. If you have been working with threads and are looking for a book to help you avoid thread problems then this book may be exactly what you need. The author does an excellent job of explaining why threads are not easy to use correctly and then provides an extensive library of classes that can be used to overcome thread problems. These classes are the meat of the book. Each class is designed to solve a specific problem that using threads by themselves can create. In general the classes are explained well although there were several blocks of code that I thought deserved a deeper discussion.
The topics covered are extensive: exclusion semaphores, counting semaphores, locks with timeouts, and read/write locks. The semaphore classes provided can solve a host of problems and are worth the price of the book by themselves. For Swing the author discusses timers, alarms, thread safety, observers, and multicasters. The discussion of Swing and threads is critical for Swing developers to understand but is often skipped over in books on Swing. However, I have one complaint with this book. The main reason for buying this book is the code but the author insists on either a mention in your about box or you must pay a license fee to use the code. For some corporate IT departments this could be an issue.
(Thomas Paul - bartender, September 2001)
More info at Amazon.com
More info at Amazon.co.uk
More info at FatBrain.com