The Theory and Practice of Concurrency

Book excerpt: Since Professor Hoare's book Communicating Sequential Processes was first published, his notation has been extensively used for teaching and applying concurrency theory. The most significant development since then has been the emergence of tools to support the teaching and industrial application of CSP. This has turned CSP from a notation used mainly for toy examples into one which can and does support the description of industrial-sized problems. In order to understand the tools you need a good grasp of the fundamental concepts of CSP, therefore the book is, in the first instance, a text on the principles of the language rather than being a manual on how to apply its tools. The Theory and Practice of Concurrency is divided into 3 sections. Part I is a foundation course on CSP, covering essentially the same material as the Hoare book, except that most of the mathematical theory has been omitted. It introduces the ideas behind the operational, denotational and algebraic models of CSP. Parts II and III go into more detail about the theory and practice of CSP. Either of them would make a one semester course or though they are independent of each other. This book assumes no mathematical knowledge except for a basic understanding of sets, sequences and functions. Part I and III use no sophisticated mathematics, and the extra amount needed for Part II is contained within Appendix A (which introduces the theory of partial order and metric/restriction spaces). The book brings substantial new insights into the important subjects of computer security, fault tolerance, real-time modelling, communications protocols and distributed databases. Each of these is supported by a case study and guidance on how to apply automated analysis to verify systems.