[genrez]

I've read v1 of the book, and the author does cover the fact that many parallel problems can be covered by using shell scripts or databases. He calls these problems you are talking about "embarrassingly parallel" and encourages the reader to take advantage of parallel tools whenever possible.

The rest of the book talks about doing data sharing efficiently (i.e. for not embarrassingly parallel problems), including some things I don't think I ever would have run across otherwise like RCU. All the while he explains the use cases for each of the techniques. If you are interested in making the most of your processors (and I suspect you are given this post), and are up for a technical read, I'd highly recommend this book.

EDIT: By which I mean to say that he covers all the stuff you posted, and explains exactly when it is worthwhile to use the high performance and communication techniques. If you want to know just the basic stuff, read the first 3 chapters.