About this Item
Dust off your parallel brain and prepare to think in tidy little handshakes. A Tutorial Introduction to Occam Programming (1987) by Dick Pountain and David May (yes, that May of transputer folklore) is the crisp, caffeinated guide to the language that politely suggests your program stop yelling across a shared memory and start passing notes down the corridor. Published by BSP Professional Books , it?s the compact catechism of processes, channels, and calm determinism , delivered with the serene confidence of a lab demo that never segfaults because it never had pointers to begin with. Occam (stylised with monkish minimalism) is concurrency without the drama: PAR , SEQ , ALT , and a handshake protocol so courteous it could chair a committee. Pountain & May show you how to wire little boxes that do little jobs and then?here?s the trick? do them all at once without setting the carpet on fire . It?s like Lego for algorithms: click, click, click, and suddenly you?ve built a factory where no one collides and the forklifts talk through letter slots. Inside, expect: Concurrency you can diagram on a napkin : processes that behave, channels that mind their manners, and scheduling that doesn?t need a lie-down. The holy trinity : SEQ for tidy chores, PAR for simultaneous smugness, and ALT for when the doorbell and the kettle go off together. Determinism for adults : the joy of knowing exactly why your program works, and exactly why it can?t possibly misbehave (until you look away). Transputer-flavoured examples that teach you to scale from polite duet to chamber orchestra without anyone playing the same trumpet. Elegant IO and timeouts that make your modern event loop look like it turned up late and borrowed a cable. The tone is tutorial without being schoolmarmy, practical without being joyless. You?ll learn why message passing beats mutiny , how to factor work into small, testable tasks , and what happens when your program stops thinking about where the work lives and starts thinking about who speaks to whom . Side effects? Only the good kind: fewer race conditions, more smug grins. Why this copy? It arrives from the gloriously literal emporium Crappy Old Books in Condition: Good ?translation: clean text, square spine, honest edge-wear . The sort of book that has seen a bench, survived a lab, and still flips open flat at the chapter where you finally get ALT . Not mint, not mangled? robustly readable , which is exactly what a tutorial should be. Vital stats for your project log: Title: A Tutorial Introduction to Occam Programming Authors: Dick Pountain & David May Publisher: BSP Professional Books , 1987 ISBN: 9780632018475 Condition: Good (tested, stable, no deadlocks detected) Vendor: Crappy Old Books ?the name shrugs; the stock synchronises. Buy it for the clarity ; keep it for the discipline . After a few chapters you?ll start arranging your to-do list in SEQ , handling email in ALT , and making coffee in PAR (careful with the kettle). You may also discover the sneaky modernity of a ?retro? language: design your system like this, and today?s many-core world stops feeling like a stampede and starts feeling like? choreography. In a universe of shared-state melodramas, Occam is the quiet novel where everyone speaks in turn and the plot still races. Read it. Breathe out. Pass a message.
Seller Inventory # 4767
Contact seller
Report this item
