Java Multithreading, Concurrency & Performance Optimization

[Updated to 2023, including Project Loom and Virtual Threads]

Description

If you had your own jet plane, would you drive it to the grocery store or fly it on tour around the world?

Today every computer and phone comes with immense computing power and multiple cores, allowing full parallelism. In this course, you will go on a journey to learn all the fundamental tools you need to become a confident and successful multithreaded application developer. Using multithreading and concurrency, we will learn to get the most out of our computer to truly make it fly.

Teaching Philosophy

The course is designed to teach you "how to fish". Instead of memorizing classes, libraries, or Java APIs, we will learn the fundamentals of multithreaded programming, starting from the complete basics all the way to the very advanced topics in multithreading.

All lectures include the right theory and are accompanied by practical examples from relevant fields, such as:

• User Interface applications

• Image Processing

• Web Applications

• Computational programs

• And others

It's a practical course that is meant to save you time. Instead of filling hours of material, I hand-picked the most important topics based on my practical experience.

Target Student for this Course

• Students who already have some experience and basic knowledge in programming in Java.

• Students who want to acquire multithreaded, parallel programming and concurrency skills in a short period of time.

• Students who are interested in performance optimizations and getting a good foundation in the above-mentioned topics.

• Students who want to take their careers to the next level. Whether you are a

  • Newly graduate and you're looking to land a dream job.

  • A professional engineer who wants to become a better programmer and improve your skillset.

• A freelancer who wants to develop his/her own project and is looking to learn how to write efficient multithreaded code.

  Then this course is for YOU.

Short Bio

My passion for multithreading and concurrency started in college, where I worked on a highly scalable, distributed B+ Tree research project sponsored by IBM.

Later I worked as a Computer Architecture Engineer at Intel Corporation and as a Software Engineer in other companies, where I developed many applications and features involving efficient and optimized multithreaded code to deliver real-time video, audio, and data - in education, healthcare, augmented reality, and Ad Tech.

Today I am a Principal Software Engineer and Software Architect. Training and mentoring engineers on all levels are both my job and my passion.

We will learn

• Operating Systems fundamentals and motivation for multithreading and concurrency.

• The basics of multithreading - how to create threads in Java and communicate between threads in Java.

• Performance considerations and design patterns of multithreaded and parallel applications, optimizing for latency or throughput.

• Data sharing between threads in Java, all the pitfalls and challenges, as well as the solutions and best practices.

• Advanced lock-free algorithms and data structures for increased responsiveness and performance.

By the End of the Course

You will be able to

• Write correct, responsive, and performant multithreaded applications in Java for any purpose and scale.

• Apply best practices to architect multithreaded applications, algorithms, and libraries.

• Become knowledgeable in concurrency & parallel programming, which will help you in job interviews, your daily work as an engineer, and your personal projects.

Become an expert in Java Multithreading, Concurrency, and Performance Optimization today.

FAQs

- "Will the course help me with interview questions?"

Yes. The course is focused on helping you become proficient in multithreading and concurrency in general and also master multithreading in Java in particular. You will learn all you need about threads in Java as well as common topics in interview questions involving locking, synchronization in Java, heap and stack memory organization, and so on. Although the course is not focused on interview questions specifically, and there's no way to predict what you will be asked during an interview question, the knowledge you will get will definitely set you apart from other candidates.

- "Does the course cover all threading classes and APIs in Java?"

"No. There are many books and expensive academic courses which cover EVERY single class and API which would take months to finish. In addition, Oracle provides excellent Java Docs that cover and explain every single Java multithreading API and class.

This course is different.

Based on years of experience in the field, I have carefully designed a short curriculum that teaches you all the essentials in a short amount of time.

No fillers. No more wasting time learning things you could read yourself in 5 minutes or don't ever need.

This course will build the foundation for becoming an expert in multithreading and concurrency. And also be able to successfully and easily extend your own knowledge in the future.

- "What if I don't understand something during the course and I have a question, what do I do?"

Not a problem. I am here to help you succeed. Multithreading is not an easy topic; no one is expected to get it all right away. Each lecture has a Q&A section where students can ask questions about the lecture or any follow-up questions about the topic in general. I will answer all the questions promptly and ensure you have all the tools for success.

- "Does the course cover interprocess communication and distributed Systems?"

No. Although those are really interesting and important topics that involve concurrency. They are not directly related to Java multithreading, which is the main topic of the course. We do mention those topics during the course, but they are out of scope and deserve their own course. The concepts, use cases, and challenges are very different than the ones we encounter while optimizing the performance of a single multithreaded Java application, algorithm, or library, so we will not cover them here.

- "Why do I need a separate course for concurrent programming?"

Concurrent programming is fundamentally different than transitional sequential programming. As in every engineering decision, there's always a tradeoff. Parallel and Concurrent programming can have a tremendous positive impact on the application's performance and responsiveness but it is a lot harder to get it right. In this course, we will learn all the caveats, techniques, and best practices to get the most out of multithreaded applications in Java.