I think that the standard concurrent programming material
would be easier to understand if it were presented in
pattern form.  You are welcome to watch while I stumble
around and figure out whether I am right.

I've heard people claim that concurrent programming is
actually easier than sequential programming.  Moreover,
they didn't seem to be joking!  In spite of spending
several years thinking of concurrent programming, it has
always seemed a lot harder to me.  Concurrent programming
is programming with multiple processes, which implies that
several things can be happening simultaneously.  Of course,
"simultaneously" doesn't necessarily mean that they happen at the same
time, it just means that you don't know which happens
first, and that they might be happening at the same time.

One key pattern of concurrent programming is CriticalSection,
which is what you use to keep processes from interfering
with each other.  You can think of CriticalSection as what
you use to keep from having too much concurrency.  But
unwise use of CriticalSection can lead to DeadLock,
LiveLock (or Starvation, but that can't be a name here),
and ResourceContention, which are all problems that lead
to other patterns.

These patterns work in a variety of
ConcurrentExecutionEnvironments, each with its own
ConstellationOfForces.

-----

See also:
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/patterns-ace.html