Jon Kerridge obtained his PhD from the Computer Science Department at the University of Manchester in 1975. Since then he has lectured at Sheffield City Polytechnic, Sheffield University and most recently at Edinburgh Napier University. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Engineer.

He has a long standing interest in both Database Technology and in Concurrent and Parallel Programming. From the early 1980’s to the mid-1990’s he was a member of the British Group on the International Standards Committee that standardised the Database Language SQL.

He built his first concurrent system, using Concurrent Pascal, in 1976 and has retained an interest in such systems ever since. He was an early user of the Inmos Transputer and its programming language occam. While at Sheffield University he became Director of the National Transputer Support Centre. One of his main achievements during this period was to build a parallel database machine, using more than 200 Transputers, that was capable of undertaking both SQL queries and on-line transaction processing in parallel on the same data at the same time.

Since the mid-1980’s he has taught concurrent and parallel programming techniques to both post- and under-graduate students. As he moved between education institutions he always had to introduce the teaching of this subject. In particular, the teaching of Concurrent and Parallel Programming to students who have never seen the concepts before or who have been shown old-fashioned and outdated mechanisms. This book draws upon the wealth of experience he has gained during that time.

Author website: http://www.iidi.napier.ac.uk/c/people/peopleid/51