Interview-quality concurrent primitives

The exciting thing about interviews is that you hardly ever know how any of those will be conducted. Take concurrency as an example. It could be ignored, some people may ask you about plain vanilla wait/notify semantics, other about using primitives from the util.concurrent library, and then someone is likely to ask you about arguably more intellectual algorithmic side. In the latter case, a typical task is to implement something like a thread-safe bounded buffer or a read-write lock.

Well, I guess except for Messrs Lea and Goetz few would probably attempt to roll out a production quality CAS-based design having just a white board and half an hour. Which means that knowing simpler approaches makes sense at least in the context of interviews. Here where a simplistic book can help.

A half of it is dedicated to the RTSJ which seems to be more of a research toy. The other half provides a rather messy introduction to concurrency. I used to consider this book to be mostly useless (too thin theoretically, insufficiently util.concurrent-oriented for real-life development). But a few basic implementations of primitives such as semaphores and locks certainly can be used for interview purposes.