Comments about O'Reilly Media PThreads Programming:

Let me preface this by saying this book was not written for someone who just learned their first Hello World program. It assumes you are a reasonably proficient C programmer already and want to learn Pthreads.

The book walks through all the major Pthreads topics in a style that focuses on how to transform your single threaded program into one that can take advantage of Pthreads. This might sound easy and straight forward. However, as is pointed out in the book, the process sometimes requires substantial redesign of your program and workflow. As the previous commenter found out, you can not bring your preconceived notion of how threaded programs work to Pthreads and expect the technology to compensate.

I'd like to give this book 5 stars but can't for three reasons:
1. The code examples are littered with typos. Any programmer worth his oats can debug them in just a few minutes; which is what the technical editor should have done before publishing the book.
2. I have the 2nd edition, which it seems they fixed some of the errors from #1, but also added more errors, and expanded the code examples to include some of the comments from the text. The text explains that some of the examples could be expanded for more functionality, performance, or other requirements; it would have been really nice if more of these expansions were included in the 2nd edition. Also, the text notes deficiencies in the code from the 1st edition; they were fixed for the 2nd edition, but the 2nd edition text was not changed to reflect this.
3. There is more than one place where the status of a thread is not explicitly spelled out by the text. Typically you can guess what the thread would be doing, but sometimes it is not obvious. This is again a place where a good C programmer will have insights and understanding that a beginner will not. The code examples include constructs to account for the various state artifacts, though without explanation.

I would still highly recommend this book for any semi-experienced programmer who wants to know more about Pthreads. I would not recommend this book alone for someone trying to learn C programming and Pthreads all at once.

Comments about O'Reilly Media PThreads Programming:

The book was OK when I first read it. However, I think that it lacks necessary detail about thread synchronization. The mutex/condition variable example using inc_counter and watch_count wouldn't work. Frankly, I've found that there are a lot of problems one will run into if they try to develop an app after having read this book. No attempt is made to discuss what happens when a thread waiting on a condition variable doesn't get to run even though it has been signalled (using pthread_cond_signal). The gloss over of pipelining was particularly annoying to me since I really wanted to implement a working pipeline using pthreads, but haven't been able to due to the problem mentioned above. I could be missing something, but the point of the book is to ensure (at least on some level) that I'm not...