New Book: Multicore application programming

I'm very pleased to be able to talk about my next book Multicore Application Programming. I've been working on this for some time, and it's a great relief to be able to finally point to a webpage indicating that it really exists!

The release date is sometime around September/October. Amazon has it as the 11th October, which is probably about right. It takes a chunk of time for the text to go through editing, typesetting, and printing, before it's finally out in the shops. The current status is that it's a set of documents with a fair number of virtual sticky tags attached indicating points which need to be refined.

One thing that should immediately jump out from the subtitle is that the book (currently) covers Windows, Linux, and Solaris. In writing the book I felt it was critical to try and bridge the gaps between operating systems, and avoid writing it about only one.

Obviously the difference between Solaris and Linux is pretty minimal. The differences with Windows are much greater, but, when writing to the Windows native threading API, the actual differences are more syntactic than functional.

By this I mean that the name of the function changes, the parameters change a bit, but the meaning of the function call does not change. For example, you might call pthread_create(), on Windows you might call _beginthreadex(); the name of the function changes, there are a few different parameters, but both calls create a new thread.

I'll write a follow up post containing more details about the contents of the book.