How to use this book¶

Parallel Programming for Beginners is a free on-line textbook designed to teach early computing students the basics of parallel and distributed computing. Unlike a traditional textbook, we do not anticipate that this textbook be adopted in full in a particular course; rather, we imagine that components of this textbook can be used as required reading in various courses. For example, students in CS1, CS2 or Systems may find chapters 0 and 1 to be especially useful. Upper-level courses that cover message passing may choose to adopt content from chapter 2. An algorithms course may want to a subset of the sections in Chapter 3 in their course.

This book assumes that you have some programming knowledge (CS1 foundation), and are at the very least familiar with some Python and/or C. For readers unfamiliar with these concepts, we encourage you to check out other free resources such as How to Think Like a Computer Scientist and Dive into Systems.