Comment by genrilz

I've read an earlier edition. I would say it is more of a overview of the different concerns and design patterns that someone doing parallel programming would find useful. For instance, it gives you an overview of how CPU caches work, and uses that to motivate why doing synchronization is expensive. It uses this to both motivate doing as little synchronization as possible, and giving you ways to design systems which don't need (as much) synchronization, as well as to explain why RCU works so well as long as you don't need to update the synchronized structure often.

If you want a good overview, I'd recommend reading the roadmap in section 1.1. Also, I know a 600 page book (400 pages if you exclude appendixes) is a bit long, but I really enjoyed both the material presented and the style in which it was written. Hopefully that makes the length feel a bit less intimidating.