Reviews for Patterns for Parallel Programming (Software Patterns Series)

1. Easy to read and useful content

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, September 12rd, 2007

   Normally design pattern books are things that you dip into rather than read end to end, simply because they can be very dry reading. Not this one - as long as you have an interest in parallel programming, reading this end to end should be easy. But that's not to say that you couldn't just dip in to the bits that are most applicable to your work - I'm sure you could.
   
   Many of the examples given of where each pattern is used are in industry sectors other than where I work, but with such good descriptions of each pattern it is easy to picture where they are used other than the examples given and to identify where you have used them yourself without previously knowing that you were using a "named" pattern even if you have been doing it that way for years.
   
   Much of the material in this book is stuff that is hard to find elsewhere. I've heard bits of it at Intel seminars or touched on in Intel books (e.g. the Threading Building Blocks book), but otherwise have not seen this stuff in print, even though many people (possibly unknowingly) are implementing the same ideas in code.
   
   Excellent book. I've knocked one star off though, simply because the authors work on the premise that almost everyone is using one of OpenMP, MPI or Java. In practice, there are still an awful lot of people implementing such systems using C++ with either native threading APIs or third party libraries wrapping those threading APIs.