Paul Butcher - Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks: When Threads Unravel

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This book tells a story.

That sentence may seem like a strange first thought for a book, but the idea is important to me. You see, we turn away dozens of proposals for Seven in Seven books from authors who think they can throw together seven disjointed essays and call it a book. Thats not what were about.

The original story was that object-oriented programming languages were good for their time, but as pressures built around software complexity and concurrency driven by multicore architectures, functional programming languages would begin to emerge and would shape the way we program. Paul Butcher was one of the most effective reviewers of that book. After a growing four-year relationship, Ive come to understand why.

Paul has been right on the front lines of bringing highly scalable concurrency to real business applications. In the Seven Languages book, he saw hints of some of the language-level answers to an increasingly important and complicated problem space. A couple of years later, Paul approached us to write a book of his own. He argued that languages play an important part of the overall story, but they just scratch the surface. He wanted to tell a much more complete story to our readers and map out in laymans terms the most critical tools that modern applications use to solve big parallel problems in a scalable way.

At first we were skeptical. These books are hard to writethey take much longer than most other books and have a high failure rateand Paul chose a huge dragon to slay. As a team, we fought and worked, eventually coaxing a good story out of the original table of contents. As the pages came together, it became increasingly clear that Paul had not only the technical ability but also the passion to attack this topic. We have come to understand that this is a special book, one that arrives at the right time. As you dig in, youll see what I mean.