Start Concurrent - by Barry Wittman & Aditya Mathur & Tim Korb (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Multicore microprocessors are now at the heart of nearly all desktop and laptop computers. While these chips offer exciting opportunities for the creation of newer and faster applications, they also challenge students and educators. How can the new generation of computer scientists growing up with multicore chips learn to program applications that exploit this latent processing power? This unique book is an attempt to introduce concurrent programming to first-year computer science students, much earlier than most competing products. This book assumes no programming background but offers a broad coverage of Java. It includes 159 numbered and numerous inline examples as well as 301 exercises categorized as "conceptual," "programming," and "experiments." The problem-oriented approach presents a problem, explains supporting concepts, outlines necessary syntax, and finally provides its solution. All programs in the book are available for download and experimentation. A substantial index of 5,039 entries makes it easy for readers to locate relevant information. In a fast-changing field, this book is continually updated and refined. The 2013 version is the sixth "draft edition" of this volume, and features numerous revisions based on student feedback.

About the Author

Barry Wittman is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Elizabethtown College. His areas of active research are computer science pedagogy, particularly for parallel computing, and approximation algorithms for graph problems. Aditya Mathur is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. He has taught courses in computer science at all levels since 1972. He has written several books, the most well-known being an introduction to microprocessors, the first book of its kind published in India. Aditya has published extensively in international journals and conferences in the area of software engineering.