This article really resonates with me and I'm somewhat relieved to see someone else feels the same way.
I love physical books for general reading and will often buy both physical and ebook format for technical books to get the best of both worlds.
I now cannot stand print-on-demand books and, like the author, I can spot them very quickly. The quality is abysmal, and I might as well be printing them myself at that point.
I too used to default to Amazon, as the price was often about 30% cheaper. However, I've come to realise that you get what you pay for. In the UK, I just buy from Waterstones or local bookshops, as then I can trust that it has likely come from the publisher or at least can inspect in advance.
I was surprised there was no mention of OpenMP in the discussion of shared-memory parallel programming in C.
OpenMP is a lot easier to work with (and is more concise) than pthreads. It is introduced using pragma directives (so you can maintain serial and parallel versions in the same code). It includes support for many common parallel patterns (e.g. distribution of array based and task-based calculations) and makes the synchronisation easier (or automatic). It also gives you powerful control over work sharing to reduce load imbalance, etc.
It's available in most common C and C++ compilers and many other accelerated programming solutions wrap the API (e.g. you can use OpenMP within a Cython module, called from a Python script).
I love physical books for general reading and will often buy both physical and ebook format for technical books to get the best of both worlds.
I now cannot stand print-on-demand books and, like the author, I can spot them very quickly. The quality is abysmal, and I might as well be printing them myself at that point.
I too used to default to Amazon, as the price was often about 30% cheaper. However, I've come to realise that you get what you pay for. In the UK, I just buy from Waterstones or local bookshops, as then I can trust that it has likely come from the publisher or at least can inspect in advance.
I am never buying a book from Amazon again.