This book is one of the bleakest books I have read. The diarist has developed a notion that his eyes are delicate(among other psychosomatic diseases) so he lies in a darkened room most of the day. He has cut himself off from society, the only people with whom he associates are his paid staff: Doctors, talkers, helpers and wife. The talkers read and talk about themselves to Arthur who eventually beds them, grows emotionally dependent on them and lavishes them with presents to keep them. Even with his wife it's this way. Arthurs ambition is to chronicle every thought and not censor himself, and while he is mentally ill and thus deludes himself on a number of issues, he does succeed in being brutally honest especially on the members who has left his fold. I challenge anyone to find any positive human values in this book, it certainly does show the dark side of human nature.

Arthur called his diary, "... pure crap... out of the rectum of a rotting shadow and of no possible interest to anyone save a psychologist concentrating upon the disintegration of a person." Although he was a somewhat nasty, prejudiced man, I think his diary was fascinating. I especially enjoyed his descriptions of his relationships with his female employees and the narratives of their lives. This is a book for specialized tastes--not for everyone

I hope someone else out there has actually read this book -- its worth it, in many ways. While hidden away in his room during the whole of his lifetime with a medical condition no doctors could ever diagnose, the author kept a painstaking diary of his everyday "experiences". He paid for people to come sit with him and tell stories of their lives -- appealing, tragic, often sordid. He usually entered into intimate relationships with these people, all the while dissecting them within the thousands of pages of his diary. Arthur blackmailed his millionaire parents to subsidize him, viciously tormented his servants and wife and eventually committed suicide. But not before he left for posthumous publication his eerie, hateful, yet fascinating world view.

The title of this book is definately misleading, there is no practical advice on "How " to work with emotional intelligence besides endless anecdotes and examples.

Even with this entire book of loosely collected anecdotes, the auther still failed to convince me that his conclusion is based on serious, scientic research with logical analysis.

I think the auther is very biased on EQ vs IQ, the importance of EQ is overly stated. We all know IQ provides a basic framework/blueprint of a person, while EQ can really make a person excel compared with other people in similar IQ level. It should also put these two concepts in context, how important EQ/IQ in a person's success is really a variable, depending on what field, what job and what role a person is playing. In high-tech field, for example, for a technical position, I would rather hire a person with extraordinary IQ with average EQ, cause I know s/he could possibly perform as efficient as a group of 5 to10 people with average IQ. But for a tech manager position, a person with high EQ, reasonable IQ and profound knowledge in respective field would be a good fit. The way the author presents EQ is very simplistic and misleading!

How we need to over ride our emotions sometimes! Daniel Goleman's book is indeed an insight to cultivate one's mind emotionally. Understanding and raising emotional intelligence is essential to your success and leadership potentials. Daniel selects examples and anecdotes from the Fortune 500 companies which shows the competency to deal with various factors at workplace. The training tools, conflict management, building bonds and motivation, encouragement and inspirations are really necessary not with the IQs only but with the 'Emotional Intelligence skills' which enhance leadership to excel. The author shows the way how to manage feelings, interact, communicate and tackle with the issues in organization. Initiative, self control, optimism are some key factors of personal competency which make the emotional control board of the mind geared up to treat right, care and understand. A must read for every business. Its never an arrogance, ego or pride but be in tune with 'Emotional Intelligence'- Thats the trick of the trades for every savvy Leader.

Since the publication of Daniel Goleman's first book, Emotional Intelligence he has generated a remarkable industry around the topic. In this book from 2000, Goleman applies the ideas of his previous book to the workplace. Why should executives bother with this soft stuff? According to research cited by Goleman (see the summary in Appendix 2) almost all of the abilities that distinguished stars from average performers were emotional competencies. While pattern recognition and "big picture" thinking were correlated with outstanding performance, cognitive abilities in general - above a certain threshold - did not have significant correlation. "Emotional intelligence" refers to a set of competencies that characterizes how people manage feelings, interact, and communicate. Building on previous work by others, Goleman characterizes emotional intelligence as being founded on five personal and social competencies: Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy, and Social Skills. Each of these five is further analyzed into 12 personal and 13 social competencies such as Accurate Self-Assessment, Self-Control, Initiative, Developing Others, Influence, Conflict Management, and Building Bonds.
Unlike IQ, we can continue to improve emotional intelligence. Working With Emotional Intelligence is not a how-to book in the usual sense. It will help any executive understand the importance of EI in all its diverse aspects as well as showing examples of strong and weak EI in individual and organizational contexts. Improving is not easy work. Goleman explains the neurological basis of much of EI, including the role of the amygdala (which can make us impulsive and which affects our resilience under stress) and its interaction with the prefrontal lobes (which together also affect the ability to adapt to change), and the role of the catecholamines adrenaline and noradrenaline (which allow us to distinguish good stress from bad stress). Goleman looks at "empathic design" (p.139ff) and the contagious effects of emotions on groups, among other important applications in the workplace. He also provides a three-page list of "Guidelines for Emotional Competence Training". Although parts of Working With Emotional Intelligence will strike you as the obvious dressed up with stories, you can extract some important information by scanning through this book. In an age of record levels of job stress (according to an October 2002 study), any words of wisdom on this subject deserve a hearing.

This book assumes you know the subject already. The problem is that the book explains things as if the reader is already a Java programmer. How can one read & understand a company's 10Q filing if he didn't know what PE ratio meant? Then it leaves out too many details to be useful to anyone.

I get annoyed with these "kitchen sink" books that purport to cover everything and in reality *teach* us very little. I never need just *one* book for everything. I'd also like to highlight the fact that J2EE includes RMI (incl. Activation fwk), Corba (IDL, etc..), JNDI, EJB, Servlets (perhaps JSP). These topics are conspicuous by their absence so avoid this for J2EE and get: Java Enterprise in a Nutshell.
I pity any java-junior trying to balance this weighty tome on their knees: it's sheer size is unworkable. The book is a cancerous polyp on the butt of an over published tech-book-market.

I'm glad that I got this book as my first Java programming book. It was just what I needed to get up and going with Java development. The writing style is approachable and interesting, not just some technical manual for hard-core programmers, which helped me to make sense of the subject matter. I especially liked the introduction to object oriented programming, since I didn't have any exposure to OOP before. I found the "nuts and bolts" section of the book to be a good reference, but it didn't have the same amount of example code and programs that the other sections had (I'd recommend that the authors consider adding more examples and code to that section in the future since that would help with this part a lot). I also found that there was a lot of Java covered that I didn't need. I will probably never use Java and databases, for instance, so that chapter wasn't of any use to me although it's good to know that it's there if I ever do need it down the road. I also found the free online version of the original Java Bible very valuable since I wanted to learn how to program Java applets that all browsers could run, so having that plus the printed version of the Java 2 Bible was like getting two books for the price of one. Overall I found this to be an excellent first book for me, and would recommend it to others just getting started with Java and Java 2.