Parallel Programming: December 2021 Update

It is past time for another release of Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?. But first, what is the difference between an edition and a release?

The main difference is the level of validation. For example, during the several months leading up to the second edition, I read the entire book, fixing issues as I found them. So where an edition is a completed work, a release is primarily for the benefit of people who would like to see a recent snapshot of this book, but without having to install and run LaTeX and its dependencies.

Having cleared that up, here are the big-animal changes since the second edition:

1. A lot of detailed work to make the new ebook-sized PDF usable, along with other formatting improvements, courtesy of Akira Yokosawa, SeongJae Park, and Balbir Singh.
   
2. The nq build now places quick quizzes at the end of each chapter, courtesy of Akira Yokosawa.
   
3. There are a few new sections in the “Locking” chapter, the “Putting It All Together” chapter, the “Advanced Synchronization: Memory Ordering” chapter, and the “Important Questions” appendix.
   
4. There is now more validation information associated with much of the sample code throughout the book.
   
5. The “RCU Usage” section has received a much-needed upgrade.
   
6. There is now an index and a list of acronyms, courtesy of Akira Yokosawa.
   
7. A new install_latex_package.sh script, courtesy of SeongJae Park.
   
8. Greatly improved error handling, including scripts that check for common LaTeX formatting mistakes, courtesy of Akira Yokosawa.
   

Yang Lu and Zhouyi Zhou are translating the Second Edition to Chinese, and would greatly appreciate additional help.

Everyone mentioned above contributed a great many wordsmithing fixes, as did Chin En Lin, Elad Lahav, Zhouyi Zhou, and GitHub user “rootbeer”. A grateful “thank you” to everyone who contributed!