The Little Book of Semaphores is a free PDF.

Whenever I write code to synchronize multiple threads, I always think, "There must be some method to this." I've been warned by the popular adage, "Any non-trivial multithreaded program has bugs," which I believe first appeared in Poor Richard's Almanac. But I have no systematic way to think about synchronization that assures me I've handled all the cases. This book does not provide that method. What it does provide is exercises, with solutions, that have developed my facility with thinking about synchronization, and have shown common synchronization patterns that should be applicable to almost any real-world problem.

Starting from the most basic cases, the book leads the reader step-by-step through a series of increasingly complex synchronization problems, each followed by hints and finally a solution written in a Python-like pseudocode. Appendices show how to "clean up" Python's and C's threading libraries to better suit the author's tastes, and to better match the pseudocode solutions.

The classic synchronization problems included in most Computer Science curricula tend to use real-world objects to describe their constraints: E.g., philosophers are dining at a round table, and each needs two forks. Or, men and women form two lines and they must dance in pairs. In fact, synchronization problems don't arise on dance floors but in operating systems and software applications, so the classic descriptions confuse more than clarify. The author promises to present both the classic description and the actual software system it arose from, but in fact only the first few problems are presented this way. The more advanced problems (such as the dining philosophers) are not tied to software applications at all. I can't think of any use for the solutions so I skimmed the later sections.

If you thoroughly absorb the first 10 problems or so, thinking hard and working out your own solutions, you'll gain some confidence and familiarity with synchronization which will serve you in nearly all software challenges you'll actually face. In fact, a few weeks ago I had to implement a "rendezvous", a pattern in which many threads all reach the same point at the same time before proceding, and I was surprised to find I could implement it correctly in Python some years after reading the book. So invest your time in the first few chapters of the book and you'll be rewarded. The book's long tail of theoretical puzzles is best left to grad students.