Effective Java, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11. Concurrency

THREADS allow multiple activities to proceed concurrently. Concurrent programming is harder than single-threaded programming, because more things can go wrong, and failures can be hard to reproduce. You can’t avoid concurrency. It is inherent in the platform and a requirement if you are to obtain good performance from multicore processors, which are now ubiquitous. This chapter contains advice to help you write clear, correct, well-documented concurrent programs.

Item 78: Synchronize access to shared mutable data

The synchronized keyword ensures that only a single thread can execute a method or block at one time. Many programmers think of synchronization solely as a means of mutual exclusion, to prevent an object from ...