Concurrent Programming Reading list

This blog post is a collection of articles about threads, locks and concurrency.

Some context

I’ve had a lot of time to kill in the last few weeks so I recently completed a series of 3 classes, a specialization, on Coursera — Parallel, Concurrent, and Distributed Programming in Java Specialization.

The first two classes, Parallel Programming in Java and Concurrent Programming in Java were good revisions of material I had studied in one of my computer engineering classes at Purdue exactly an year ago. In the Distributed Programming in Java class I used Hadoop and Spark for the first time and revised more material related to networking and about different approaches to combine distribution with multithreading that I had learned in my classes at Purdue. This class was mostly about high-level abstractions and frameworks that are useful in distributed systems.

In the Concurrent Programming class I found various articles listed under the ‘Optional Reading’ section that were extremely resourceful. In college I had studied concurrency in my computer architecture class. I had referred to the textbook and my professor’s slides. I don’t have that course textbook or my professor’s slides anymore. So I’ve made this list of articles to be my go-to resource for fundamentals of concurrency.

The list

Threads

• Wikipedia article on Threads

Structured Locks

• Tutorial on Intrinsic Locks and Synchronization in Java
• Tutorial on Guarded Blocks in Java

Unstructured Locks

• Tutorial on Lock Objects in Java

Liveness

• Wikipedia article on Deadlock and Livelock
• Java examples of deadlock due to synchronized methods and starvation and livelock

Critical sections

• Wikipedia article on Critical Sections
• Wikipedia article on Atomicity

Object-Based Isolation

• Wikipedia article on Monitors

Atomic Variables in Java

• Tutorial on Atomic Integers in Java
• Article in Java theory and practice series on Going atomic.
  • “By exposing new low-level coordination primitives internally, and providing a set of public atomic variable classes, it now becomes practical, for the first time, to develop wait-free, lock-free algorithms in the Java language.”
• Wikipedia article on Atomic Wrapper Classes in Java

Read-Write Isolation

• Wikipedia article on Readers-writer lock

Optimistic Concurrency and some Java data structures

• Wikipedia article on Optimistic concurrency control
• java.util.concurrent.*
  • AtomicReference class, ConcurrentLinkedQueue class, ConcurrentHashMap class

Linearizability

• Wikipedia article on the Linearizability

Miscellanious

• Dining philosophers problem: an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them