As with any dawn, some of us have overslept. Although most programmers get chills at the mention of this topic, we must remember that even Visual Basic can create multithreaded server applications. The ability to build multithreaded applications is one of the most important skills you can add to your repertoire.
Threads are cheaper than processes in terms of initialization, termination, and efficiency.
For example, consider a web server that can receive thousands of hits per day. It would be far more expensive to initialize and terminate each request as a separate process. To implement such a technology, developers need a reliable source of information. The Complete Guide to Threads , by Jim Beveridge and R. Wiener. I selected this book because it received laudatory reviews on the Internet and because the authors wrote the book around a FAQ-style layout.