Customer comments on this selection.
 Excellent Introduction to MPI
This book provides very good introductory material to beginners of parallel programming in MPI. It provides many examples and through them one can learn not only the syntax of MPI but also how to design parallel programs.
 Probably not worth the money
Well, to begin with, for a book that has "...programming in C..." in the title, there is very little C code in the text-- most is pseudocode. Most of the book is an analysis of various parallel algorithms, with very little instruction on how to use MPI. There are much better resources out there for learning MPI, as Quinn only covers about 30 of the over 100 functions in MPI, without all that much detail. Some of extremely important and necessary concepts of parallel programming are only mentioned in passing...such as load balancing. Most of the applications (with the exception of matrix operations) are simple and basic to the point of making me wonder why you would even bother parallelizing them...even as a pedagogical tool. The book does a very good job of analyzing algorithms, but calling it an "introduction to MPI" or even an "introduction to parallel programming" textbook is incorrect.
 Over-priced, under-delivered
If you're looking for a textbook for a class on parallel programming, this may be for you, but I wouldn't know. If you're trying to figure out MPI to actually write some code, this one definitely isn't for you. Get Pacheco's book instead. Half the price, too.
Basically, there is very little tutorial-style programming coverage in here, more design and analysis of parallel algorithms. The majority of MPI function calls is not even covered in detail, but only listed in the appendix. Give me a break.
Very clear writing and good solid information
The thing that impressed me was that the writing was so clear. True, the sentences tend to be short, but that is high virtue in technical writing. My students have been very positive about the book.
I also think the mathematical analysis is good, too, not too easy but not super hard either.
This book just pulls together all the crucial information between two covers. I find myself agreeing almost exactly with where he places his "key" symbols in the margins to highlight important sentences, which is also a good sign that the book is "right on."
A good introductory book
I used this book in my parallel computing course. It is really a good introductory book on parallel programming. Some examples are given in the book. The first seven chapters discuss parallel algorithm design, MPI, examples on The sieve of Eratosthenes and Floyd's algorithm, and performance analysis. Some other topics that also covered (some of these may or may not have working examples) include the matrix-vector multiplication, Monte Carlo, matrix multiplication, solving linear systems, sorting, FFT, search, and finite difference methods. Since there are so many topics to be covered in a book of only 500 pages, the discussions on most of these topics are not very depth. Overall, I still recommend this book for beginners in parallel algorithm design.
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