FWIW I resonate a lot with what the author says about the art of multiprocessor programming. When I learned it in college (from the author himself no less), it

FWIW I resonate a lot with what the author says about the art of multiprocessor programming. When I learned it in college (from the author himself no less), it felt like a very theoretical introduction to a deeply practical problem domain. I could complete the practice problems well, but that didn’t teach me the intuition for writing multithreaded programs. Later on once I’ve been through the trenches in the industry and came back to the book, everything started to make more sense and I started to see parallels with distributed systems. Honestly I think if you really want to understand this topic, getting exposed to atomic memory ordering early on and writing simplified spin locks / SPSC queues is the way to go. You don’t even have to implement them correctly - the implementation just needs to teach you what could go wrong. The book operates at an abstraction level that makes it not very useful inexperienced students.