Notes and Further Reading

A comprehensive description of the Therac-25 incident and investigation can be obtained from the paper, An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents, by Nancy Leveson and Clark Turner (1993).

The automobile cruise control system is a simplified version of a real system. The example is fully discussed in Chapter 8.

There are a number of existing books on concurrency and concurrent programming. A collection of original papers on the invention and origins of concurrent programming from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s is presented in the book by Per Brinch Hansen (2002), The Origins of Concurrent Programming: From Semaphores to Remote Procedure Calls. Ben-Ari (1990) provides a simple introduction to the area in his book, Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming. A comprehensive coverage of the area, with logical reasoning and many examples, is provided by Greg Andrews (1991) in his book, Concurrent Programming: Principles and Practice. A further readable text in the area is that by Burns and Davies (1993), Concurrent Programming. A formal, logic-based approach is provided by Fred Schneider (1997) in his book, On Concurrent Programming. For more on the pragmatics of object-orientation and concurrent programming in Java, readers may consult the book by Doug Lea (1999), Concurrent Programming in Java™: Design Principles and Patterns. A recent comprehensive text is that by Vijay Garg (2004), Concurrent and Distributed Computing in Java.