Yep, the CSP style of channel communication is great. Those thinking Erlang is better than sliced bread need to make sure they're up on what came before and after; http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ Personally, I find Erlang to be too clunky as a language. Good for special purpose telephone switching software maybe, but for general programming the CSP style can be done in nicer ways than having to switch to a whole new language.
Not CSP, no, but libraries that bolt onto existing languages, e.g. C, Python. I'd love to see it become more of a mainstream technique in Python than `import threading', etc.
Ignore the crufty Occam (Transputer anyone?) syntax, just concentrate on the concepts. Although some of the PDFs seem to have many pages, often a page is the same as the previous with a minor change; they're slides!