Book Review: .NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

Disclosure: I was offered a free electronic copy of this book in exchange for this book review. The publisher had no input on the review.

Parallel processing is one of the most challenging problems for the modern developer. The first time you start creating threads, you open yourself up to a whole host of problems, including deadlocks and data corruption. The ASP.NET team went to great lengths to hide all the difficulties of multi-threading by presenting a programming model that allows developers to reap the benefits of multi-threading without sweating most of the details. Similarly, the Task Parallel Library – introduced in .NET 4, and greatly improved in .NET 4.5 – attempts to bring that same level of abstraction without diving deep into the threading details.