Programming the Propeller with Spin – A Beginner’s Guide to Parallel Processing, Harprit Sandhu, McGraw-Hill, 2010
Propeller is a chip with 8 32 bit CPU’s, and Spin is a language provided by the chip manufacturer. This book is about designing electronic embedded systems around the chip, and coding the software to run on it. Example code controls stepper and DC motors. You can’t compare this all with IBM’s Cell processor, it is in a completely different universe. 350 pages.
The Art of Concurrency / Clay Breshears, O’Reilly, 2009
All programmers will want to read this. 300 pages.
1 – Want to go Faster? Raise Your Hands if You Want to go Faster!
2 – Concurrent or not Concurrent?
3 – Proving Correctness and Measuring Performance
4 – Eight Simple Rules for Designing Multithreaded Applications
5 – Threading Libraries
6 – Parallel Sum and Prefix Scan
7 – Mapreduce
8 – Sorting
9 – Searching
10 – Graph Algorithms
11 – Threading Tools
Professional Windows embedded CE 6.0 / Samuel Phung, Wiley, 2009
This will be useful if you are developing apps for mobile or embedded using Windows CE. 400 pages.
Professional multicore programming : design and implementation for C++ developers / Cameron Hughes, Tracey Hughes, Wiley, 2008
Concurrent programming has become important for a greater proportion of all programmers since commodity PC’s went multicore. Good books on this have been in OPL for years (click on the 5-star tag to see some of them). This book is useful because it gathers all the important topics into one place. It starts with a good introduction, then outlines machine architecture for Intel, AMD, Sparc and Cell. Then it gets into programming structure for thread synchronization, with code examples in C++. It has good reference information on Posix threads (pthreads). It is intended for C++ programmers, but Java programmers will gain from reading it too. It is not the most readable book in the library.
Linux appliance design : a hands-on guide to building Linux appliances / by Bob Smith, No Starch Press, 2007
Here is a good practical introduction to designing appliances (DVRs, routers, any intelligent device) using Linux and open source tools. It discusses architecture then practical details with example code. The book is very readable, and the authors clearly have real experience.