ABSTRACT
Our programs so far have been written based on the basic assumption that only one thing is happening at any given time. The instructions in the program execute one after another and control might jump from one method to another, but at any given time you can point to a single line of code and say that is what is happening at that time. This type of sequential processing of instructions is called a thread. Our programs so far have been written to utilize a single thread of execution. Such programs do not take full advantage of modern hardware. In this chapter we will learn how to make our programs use multiple threads. Multithreading can be used to simplify logic in some places, but most of the time we will use it to make our programs run faster or be more responsive.
