Packt Publishing has
recently published ".NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook"
by Brian Freeman which may be helpful as an introduction into new
methods of working with multi-threaded applications available since
.NET Framework 4.0. The book will be useful for those developers who
already have experience with C#, basics of functional programming
and Visual Studio. Previous knowledge of threads, thread pools and
related concepts is not required though.
The author starts from
detailed description of Task – how tasks should be created,
cancelled, waited for completion, how exceptions should be handled
and so on. Each small piece of information - which is called recipe
in the book - is provided with code.
From single Task author
then goes to description of continuations – how multiple tasks may
be organized in program and how one task can be scheduled in case
another task completes or fails. Idea of continuations helps to solve
well-known problem of updating GUI in multi-threaded application.
Brian Freeman explains how
to use parallel loops and parallel LINQ queries and, what is even
more important, when they have advantages comparing to the similar
sequential entities.
Other interesting topics
covered in the book include: thread-safe collections, coordinating
the work with various synchronization primitives, debugging of
multi-threaded application using Parallel Stacks / Parallel Watch
windows. Several recipes are devoted to Task Based Asynchronous
Pattern.
Brian Freeman's book is a
great reference for the developers who would like to start using
Parallel Extensions library as soon as possible. Though to understand
deeply how this library works inside, reading of some other books may
be also required.
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