Book review: C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming

A couple of weeks ago, Packt publishing asked me to review Gastón C. Hillar book “C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner’s Guide”. They sent me a copy of this book and today, I’m ready to write a review for it. But before I’ll start reviewing it, I want to apologize to the publisher and author for the impartial review.

First of all, you should understand, that this book is about how it possible (for this book author) to write four programs (with awful user interface) using different classes from System.Threading namespace to perform tasks, rather then what is multithreaded programming and how to achieve best performance by utilizing multiple CPU power. Your own programs will not run faster after reading this book, but you’ll probably know (if you did not know before) how to use BackgroundWorker, Thread, ThreadPool, AutoResetEvent and WaitHandle classes. Also, there is a small chapter about thread context switching for UI thread delegates invocation and parallel extensions.

There are some technical misconceptions and errors in this book. But it is not the major problem of it. The problem is that while reading this book I question myself whom this book aimed at? Language style is somewhere between blog chatting (better then mine) and MSDN style documentation. I admit I don’t know quite how to categorize this, the author writes in a style that is just bizarre (even more bizarre then mine in this blog ) Overall, it sounds like I’m reading a conversation between two beginner-level programmers trying to explain one each other why they are using certain coding convention in C#.

Another half of this 395 pages book is just copy-paste stuff from Visual Studio (including it default tabulations and indentations). Here one of representative examples of such copy/paste

// Disable the Start button
butStart.Enabled = false;
// Enable the Start button
butStart.Enabled = true;

…

// Some very useful property, which used as private member for another public property
private int priVeryUserfulProperty;

public int VeryUserfulProperty
{
   get
   {
      return priVeryUserfulProperty;
   }
   set
   {
      priVeryUserfulProperty = value;
   }
}

Verdict: Not very exemplary introduction to some classes inside System.Threading namespace for fellow students who like to read blogs, rather then books and documentation and do not want to understand how it works under the hoods, but write something and forget it.

3- of 5 on my scale. This book is not all bad, though, but apparently suitable for very specific audience, which definitely excludes me.

7 Responses to “Book review: C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming”

Ariel Ben Horesh Says:
March 21st, 2009 at 6:10 am
Also the title is misleading. There is no such thing c# 2008 or c# 2005. There is VS 2008 or 2005. Did they mean c# 3.0/2.0 or .Net framework 2.0/3.5.

If I understand correctly the title should have been “Threading in .Net 3.5, Examples in C#” and be over with
Me Says:
March 21st, 2009 at 7:28 pm
This is the excellent book that I ever seen
Mike Says:
March 21st, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Hi Tamir,

I own this book and I must say that I found your review a bit incomplete.
I liked the book (4 out of 5 on my scale), because I learned how to exploit multicore CPUs. That’s exactly what I was looking for with this book. It helped me a lot and I liked the examples.
I do not agree with a sepecific sentence of your review: “just copy-paste stuff from Visual Studio”. The examples are very well explained using nice diagrams. Just my opinion.

Cheers,

Mike
romi Says:
March 21st, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Tamir is right. I also bought this book and it has copypast of not relevant code without basic concepts explained
Diego Fernandez Ortiz Says:
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:32 am
@Tamir: You say “you’ll probably know (if you did not know before) how to use BackgroundWorker, Thread, ThreadPool, AutoResetEvent and WaitHandle classes”.
If you already knew how to use these, you wouldn’t buy this book.
The book is right for me. I’ve learned a lot about multicore programming. I didn’t know how to use BackgroundWorker, Threadpool and Threads.
@Romi: “Not relevant code”? I don’t agree with you. The book does a great work in explaining very difficult topics.
@Mike: I also liked the book (4.5 out of 5 on my scale)
I’m not a book reviewer. However, I found 2 more complete reviews:
http://www.devsource.com/c/a/Techniques/Book-Review-C-2008-and-2005-Threaded-Programming/

http://blog.mjjames.co.uk/2009/03/book-review-c-2008-and-2005-threaded.html

If you are an expert, I’m sure you don’t have to read a Beginner’s Guide book.
However, if you are a beginner (I am), I’m sure the book does a good job.

As Mike said: “Just my opinion”

Regards,
Diego Fernandez Ortiz (Y olé…)
Boris Daich Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 6:06 am
Offtopic.

I understand that You do not need the answer from Intel – you did not send me the mail.

Boris.
Shawn B. Says:
April 17th, 2009 at 11:34 am
This isn’t the kind of book I’d be interested in, it seems more like .NET Multithreading where the topic is more or less the mechanics of using the .NET threading primitives.

More to my taste are the following two books:

Concurrent Programming for Windows
Art of multiprocessor programing

Each of which will make you Zen masters of multiple processor programming with very deep understanding of how to do things and what to do.