Systems / ILLUSTRATED SERIES

Illustrated Concurrency

Async, Threads, and Race Conditions

Draw the order of events and find the bug. Explore threads, asynchronous tasks, locks, and processes through one Python downloader.

Coming soon

We’re preparing this book for publication. Its Amazon listing will be linked here when it’s available.

Read a sample chapter

A REAL LOOK INSIDE

Sequential, Concurrent, Parallel

The words sequential, concurrent, and parallel answer different questions. Sequential work has no overlap. Concurrent work has multiple tasks in progress during an overlapping period. Parallel work executes more than one operation at the same instant. A program can be concurrent without being parallel, and it can use both.

We will develop these distinctions with a batch downloader. Given several URLs, the program fetches each response and performs a small amount of processing. Later versions will use threads, async tasks, queues, and processes, but the first version is an ordinary loop.

An excerpt from the working manuscript. Read the illustrated pages or download the complete sample chapter.

Read the sample →

First page of Sequential, Concurrent, Parallel, a sample from Illustrated Concurrency

A LITTLE MORE CLARITY

What you’ll explore.

Developers who understand sequential code and want to reason about concurrent work.

The outline is from the working manuscript and may change before publication.

01Interleaving
02Threads
03Race conditions
04Locks
05Async and event loops
06Multiprocessing

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