As processors become faster and multiprocessor systems become cheaper, the need to take advantage of multithreading in order to achieve full hardware resource utilization only increases the importance of being able to incorporate concurrency in a wide variety of application categories. For many developers, concurrency remains a mystery. Developing, testing, and debugging multithreaded programs is extremely difficult because concurrency hazards do not manifest themselves uniformly or reliably. This book is intended to be neither an introduction to concurrency (any threading chapter in an "intro" book does that) nor is it an encyclopedic reference of All Things Concurrency (that would be Doug Lea's Concurrent Programming in Java). Instead, this title is a combination of concepts, guidelines, and examples intended to assist developers in the difficult process of understanding concurrency and its new tools in J2SE 5.0. Filled with contributions from Java gurus such as Josh Bloch, David Holmes, and Doug Lea, this book provides any Java programmers with the basic building blocks they need to gain a basic understanding of concurrency and its benefits.