This textbook focuses on practical parallel C++ programming at the graduate student level. In particular, it shows the APIs and related language features in the C++ 17 and C++ 20 standards, covering both single node and distributed systems. It shows that with the parallel features in the C++ 17 and C++ 20 standards, learning meta-languages like OpenMP is no longer necessary. Using the C++ standard library for parallelism and concurrency (HPX), the same language features can be extended to distributed codes, providing a higher-level C++ interface to distributed programming than the Message Passing Interface (MPI).

The book starts with the single-threaded implementation of the fractal sets, e.g. Julia set, and Mandelbrot set, using the C++ Standard Library (SL)'s container and algorithms. This code base is used for parallel implementation using low-level threads, asynchronous programming, parallel algorithms, and coroutines. The asynchronous programming examples are then extended to distributed programming using the C++ standard library for parallelism and concurrency (HPX). Octo-Tiger, an astrophysics code for stellar merger, is used as a showcase for a portable, efficient, and scalable high-performance application using HPX.

The book's core audience is advanced undergraduate and graduate students who want to learn the basics of parallel and distributed C++ programming but are not computer science majors. Basic C++ knowledge, like functions, classes, loops, and conditional statements, is assumed as a requirement, while C++ advanced topics, like generic programming, lambda functions, smart pointers, and move semantics, are briefly summarized in the appendix.