Java is one of the great programming languages of our time. Like many of the great programming languages, a company was behind its development, adoption, and popularity. The sensational marketing blitz was enough to make many of us think that all of the work on languages was now complete, so we could start packing our bags and look for other work. Now that the dust has settled, it is clear that Java does occupy an important space in the marketplace; however, there is a great deal of potential for exploring other programming languages and techniques. The environments in which Java is being considered will require at least a subset of the ideas presented in this book: network appliances, server-side computing, workstation clustering, and parallel systems, to name a few. In this book, our aim is to give the reader some insight into what Java does and does not provide, in terms of support for concurrency. What Java does not provide, we do provide with a working library of Java code that allows the programmer to "operate at a higher-level" (to borrow a phrase from IBM marketing from the OS/2 days).
This book, like all books, does not exist in a vacuum. There are a number of competing books, some of which are appearing in new editions during the next year. We believe our book will be the first of its kind in terms of multithreading and its application to real-world programming.