Java Concurrency in Practice

Java Concurrency in Practice is a recognized classic in the field of Java concurrency. Its authors come from the expert group in the Java Community Process responsible for concurrency utilities (JSR 166), and a considerable number of the APIs in the java.util.concurrent package came from their hands. The book is not content to list APIs; it focuses on explaining why these concurrency utilities exist, how to use them correctly, and the design principles, patterns, and mental models behind them. The book is divided into four parts and 16 chapters in total. Part I, "Fundamentals," begins with the concepts of concurrency and thread safety, and discusses atomicity, race conditions, intrinsic locks and reentrancy, object visibility and safe publication, thread confinement and immutability, and how to compose small thread-safe classes into larger thread-safe components. Part II, "Structuring Concurrent Applications," centers on task execution, introducing the Executor framework, task cancellation and shutdown, configuration and extension of thread pools, and uses single-threaded subsystems such as graphical user interfaces to illustrate the relationship between concurrency and responsiveness. Part III, "Liveness, Performance, and Testing," analyzes liveness hazards such as deadlock, explains Amdahl's law, lock contention, and context-switching overhead, and presents methods for correctness testing and performance testing of concurrent programs. Part IV, "Advanced Topics," goes deep into explicit locks, AQS and custom synchronizers, atomic variables and non-blocking algorithms, and finally arrives at the theoretical foundation of the Java Memory Model. The book is interspersed with numerous examples and "dangerous" code snippets drawn from real engineering, helping readers build an intuition for judging the correctness of concurrent code. The book was nominated for the 16th Jolt Award and is an advanced reading that Java backend, middleware, and framework developers cannot avoid. Readers should have some foundation in Java syntax and object-oriented programming before reading.