The October 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine features lots of articles about parallelism and concurrency. I guess it's all the rage these days! That's what happens when Moore's Law is no longer directly related to more GHz but more CPU cores instead.

Concurrency is one of the big reasons why there's a push towards functional languages. I myself am trying to wrap my head around one called Haskell. Here's a free online book (print version coming out soon) about it. I guess this is a programming paradigm shift that is as notable as the shift from procedural to object-oriented programming. If I don't get this right, I'll be likely to produce something like POOP (I haven't found a nifty nickname for functional code that looks like imperative code yet). Maybe that's the reason I'm hesitant to learn F# even though it's the one being groomed to be the premier functional language for the .NET CLR.