As processors become faster and multiprocessor systems become cheaper, the

need to take advantage of multithreading in order to achieve full hardware

resource utilization only increases the importance of being able to incorporate

concurrency in a wide variety of application categories. For many developers,

concurrency remains a mystery. Developing, testing and debugging

multithreaded programs is extremely difficult because concurrency hazards do

not manifest themselves uniformly or reliably. This book is intended to be

neither an introduction to concurrency (any threading chapter in an intro

book does that) nor is it an encyclopedic reference of All Things Concurrency

(that would be Doug Lea's Concurrent Programming in Java). Instead, this title

is a combination of concepts, guidelines, and examples intended to assist

developers in the difficult process of understanding concurrency and its new

tools in J2SE 5.0. Filled with contributions from Java gurus such as Josh Bloch,

David Holmes and Doug Lea, this book provides any Java programmers with

the basic building blocks they need to gain a basic understanding of

concurrency and its benefits.