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Rating: 
Summary: Second best book on the subject
Review: As usual, O'Reilly have produced an excellent reference book. In a few respects, this book is preferable to Scott Norton's "Thread Time" - it has better examples, for one.But this book is not as detailed or complete as Norton, so I don't recommend it as the best choice on the subject.
Rating:
Summary: I think it provides a good overview
Review: I agree with the other reviews that it's not the ultimate authority on pthreads, but I think it provides a great overview from a very practical standpoint. It has lots of good discussions on when to use threads, general design priniciples of using threads, problems you will likely encounter, and discussions of performance. It also has some good examples, including an example of how to turn some non-thread-safe linked list code into thread-safe code. I really like that its brief and doesn't go into too many details -- you can read it from cover to cover. If you want more details, you will want to refer to one of the other books that the other reviewers have mentioned.
Rating:
Summary: I think it provides a good overview
Review: I agree with the other reviews that it's not the ultimate authority on pthreads, but I think it provides a great overview from a very practical standpoint. It has lots of good discussions on when to use threads, general design priniciples of using threads, problems you will likely encounter, and discussions of performance. It also has some good examples, including an example of how to turn some non-thread-safe linked list code into thread-safe code. I really like that its brief and doesn't go into too many details -- you can read it from cover to cover. If you want more details, you will want to refer to one of the other books that the other reviewers have mentioned.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good
Review: I found it too be an excellent overview. Its treatment of the issues associated with threads and signals I think was especially useful. My only complaint is with the Quick Reference in Appendix C. The reference provides no description of possible function call errors. While I admit the errors are dependant on the particular Pthreads implementation, however there are a core number of errors that would be common throughout all, or at least most, implementations. The point is if you are to do any actual programming, which I presume is the reason for a reference of function calls, you need to know what return values to expect. Providing no reference would have been better then providing a useless one.
Rating: 
Summary: o'reilly should be embarrased!!
Review: I read the book a number of years ago to learn pthreads.
I found numerous errors in the examples -- speaking
at work to a colleague I recall we laughed at this book --
It was such a disaster. I may read the book again (over the last few years I learned a lot about
pthreads) and give a careful analysis of it. I had a first printing -- there were gobs of errata on
Oreilly's site -- maybe they put in enough corrections so
the examples run -- but I'm amazed how shoddy the first printing was. Stay away from it...
Rating: 
Summary: Good Pthreads book but I like other available books better
Review: Of the 4 I've read on the topic, this is a good book but my personal preference (based on how the information was presented, the relevance of coding examples, etc.) is for the Butenhof Pthreads book (excellent) or the Lewis, et. al. Multithreaded Programming book (also very good).
Rating:
Summary: Not the best effort I've read...
Review: The short code snippets are horrible. If the author wants to save money and space by using code snippets, it should be checked and checked again for accuracy. There are numerous errors in the code. For example, on page 80, there is an example of condition variable usage. However, there are no function prototypes! This is just one of numerous obvious ommissions. Trust me, there are non-obvious errors too. If you're looking for an overview, this will do you fine. However, if you're looking for some decent code examples to look at, I'd suggest Butenhof's book instead. Multi-threaded programming is difficult enough, why make it harder for yourself?
Rating:
Summary: Okay for concepts, but no help in coding
Review: The strength of this book is it's brevity: 233 pp of text plus appendices. But the code samples are incomplete (fragments). You'll be able to get an idea of how pthreads work and the methods available, but you'll have a very hard time if you need to actually write code. There is an error on p.126. If you want to write code, get "Programming with POSIX Threads" by David Butenhof. It has complete code examples and is not that much longer: 305 pp of text plus appendices. But I did find this Nichols book helpful when I was curious about pthreads. I commend O'Reilly for the nice illustrations in this book -- above average. They helped convey concepts.
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