Back on March 29, 2007, Charles Sharp sent this email to his fellow OCI/Advantage employees:
Greetings All,
Now that Eric has whetted your appetite for Java’s take on concurrency (or thrown you into a panic due to your understanding level), I thought this would be a good time to see if there is an interest in getting a study group together to go through the book, Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz et al.
The study will be done in two parts. The book has 16 chapters. Part one of the study would cover chapters 2 through 9. Part two would cover 10 through 16. We’ll decide about Part two after we see how Part one goes.
Today I’m soliciting people to participate in Part one.
There will be eight meetings. (The group might decide to have a pre-study organizational meeting to discuss and argue about format changes in the usual uninteresting fashion.)
Study meetings will be held during lunch hour (something like 11:30 to 12:30 with a half-hour overrun buffer to 1:00) once a week at the OCI office.
Due to other meetings through the week, I’m proposing either Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday as the meeting day.
The format of a meeting, as is always the case with a group of experienced wonks, is open for discussion. Here’s a first pass to start that discussion.
Everyone reads the week’s chapter before the meeting. (From my perspective, this is non-negotiable. If you don’t have time to read a chapter a week, you just don’t have time to sign up for the study group.)
Each week one person will be assigned the chore of providing code that illustrates the concepts discussed in the week’s chapter. I expect most of the attendees relate to code examples as well as anything. So please note that part of what you’re signing up for is to provide this illustrative code for one of the meetings.
After the code presentation and attending discussion, I would like to leave time to do a quick “round the table” where each attendee has a chance to pitch in some point (or points) from the book that didn’t get covered.
And that’s pretty much the format plan. In summary, we’re agreeing to meet once a week for eight weeks and do the homework.
If that sounds like your idea of fun, please stay away from me.
If that sounds like something that would be useful and constructive and a good leg up in understanding some crucial concepts, then give me a shout via reply email.
And thus, the study group was formed. We first met last week on Monday, April 16, and have met every Monday since then! Enjoy.
