This book is divided into four sections. The first considers God's love for us and our response of prayer. The second and third parts explore the Scriptural ideal of unceasing prayer. The fourth section, which is approximately half of the book, examines three "techniques" which aim to foster unceasing prayer, namely: centering prayer, the Jesus Prayer, and lectio divina.

The first, more theoretical, half of the book can be comforting to those who are confused by their relationship with God. The second half offers practical, gentle advice along with how-to instruction. The sections on lectio and the Jesus Prayer are especially good.

Java Pitfalls is an average book that junior level Java developer may find useful. The book is divided into several sections, with each section containing one or more ideas, tips, advice, pitfalls, "what not to do," etc. Java Pitfall is a fairly dry read and is not as solid as other books on the market that follow a similar style (think Practical Java by Peter Haggar and Effective C++ by Meyers).

Java Pitfalls covers the obvious and mundane (variable scope, how to compare strings, and try/catch/finally), GUI topics, and a handful of interesting areas such as thread synchronization, deadlocks, and string concatenation inside of loops. Junior developers should find some of the topics useful, but experienced developers will find much of the book lacking - perhaps worth a cursory glance at best. With that said, maybe the book should be marketed to novice developers because my overall criticism of the book is that it is not useful book for experienced Java developers. There is always a place for introductory Java books, but Java Pitfalls does nothing to excel and stand out from an otherwise already crowded retail bookshelf.

The most disappoint aspect of this title for me is the GUI coverage - there is too much! Of the 322 pages, over 119 pages (a third of the book) are dedicated to GUI topics. My personal opinion is that GUI topics should have been relegated to another title because the authors could not dedicate enough space to be really useful for AWT and Swing developers. At the same time the included material is worthless for the majority of Java developers that work with some derivative of the J2EE architecture (J2EE is not the focus of the title, but I think the criticism is fair).

I found a few topics in Java Pitfalls interesting and worth reading, but most of the topics are fairly lightweight for anyone that is moderately experienced with the Java language. I cannot help but think that novice developers will find useful tips and practices within the pages of Java Pitfalls, but there are much better Java books on the market, which serve the same purpose. Java Pitfalls is not a book that I will keep handy in my day-to-day use, and I doubt that it will ever show up in my rotation of references that I turn to when I am stumped and need to research an issue. There too many good books on the market for me to recommend a title as average as Java Pitfalls.

I've reviewed quite a few Java books about improving the attributes of Java software. Some concentrate on improving the design, others the robustness of software or the performance. While they usually start out promising, by the end of the book you're left with a good understanding of theory but little practical skills. Java Pitfalls : Time-Saving Solutions and Workarounds to Improve Programs, breaks free of that mould, by providing a wealth of techniques and code that has real practical application. The title does not do it justice, however. Not only does the book show you how to improve programs, the advice contained within also saves you time, frustration, and effort.

After reading through even a few pages of tips within the book, you understand that the advice isn't dry theory, but practical advice gained from real-life problems that Java developers face. Michael Daconta, and his co-authors, offer warnings gained from the trenches of software development using Java.

The book is divided neatly into eight sections, covering different aspects of Java programming. A wide range of areas are covered, from the obligatory Java language syntax, to more fun topics like graphical user interfaces (using AWT and Swing), the utilities package and collections, input and output (I/O), and even improving Java performance. The one significant area lacking from the book, in my opinion, is a section on network programming pitfalls, and perhaps other advanced topics like databases. These areas are fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. However, for readers not involved with such areas, this is a moot point, and it leaves more room for other tips.

There are a total of 50 individual pieces of advice, and each is packed full of detailed code examples. Whether you're a Java newbie, or an experienced Java developer looking to improve your coding and reduce the frustration and time of software development, Java Pitfalls is an ideal addition to your book collection. With the usefulness of this advice, you'll probably find it taking a place on your desk though, rather than the bookshelf. -- David Reilly, reviewed for the Java Coffee Break

I can not say enough good things about Java Pitfalls. I actually recieved this book as a gift and was overwhemingly surprised with the amount of applicable knowledge that this book provided me almost immediately after I started reading it.

The premise of Java Pitfalls is primarily to help those who are familiar with the langauge and have had some experience producing applications in Java. As with all programming languages, there are always better, more efficient ways to do things. Some are obvious and usually cross many languages, and some are not so obvious and are very language-specific.

Java Pitfalls points out a lot of common mistakes made in Java development as well as providing optimization and means of producing much cleaner code that runs faster and uses less memory.

The examples are very thorough and the book is very concise in its reasoning for why certain ways of implementing Java are faster than others, complete with benchmark results comparing the common ways of implementing solutions to their more optimal solutions. The book doesn't just show you how to write code more efficiently, it also explains to you why some methods are better than others.

Again, I can't say enough about this book. It's like having a group of experienced Java engineers sittings beside you as your program. A great book all around.

Of all the books I've read related to Thomas Merton this is positively the worst. It is all written on conjecture and reads like a tabolid in a supermarket. It is not only an insult and attack on Thomas Merton personaly but also on everything that he held sacred and gave his life to with his honesty and his willingness to share his search.

Paul Hourihan's novel was a waste of my time. He obviously doesn't admire Merton. According to Hourihan, Merton was a total failure as a man and as a monk. Why? Because Merton failed to embrace India. He also failed because he remained a faithful Catholic. He failed because he remained a priest. (Hourihan sounds like an angry former Catholic who has embraced the East which possesses all answers to the world's problems.)
Merton didn't reject the East; he sought synthesis of East and West. And I think he may indeed have found it for himself. No doubt about it, if Merton had become a Buddhist or a follower of the Dalai Llama, Hourihan would have canonized him.
This is not a book for people who view Merton as a spiritual master. It's a mean-spirited swipe at everything Merton stood for.

I found this to be a complete waste of time and money. The book was neither scholarly nor thought-provoking. Nor was there any meaningful attempt to develop any particular premise. The impression I got was that the author felt that he could insure a wider audience by suggesting that he had some new insight on the circumstances of Merton's death. He doesn't. My impression at least was that the book is not even fundamentally 'about' Merton. Rather it is paragraph after paragraph of the author's view of his own self-evaluated "profundity" relative to eastern thought, with brief references to events from Merton's last week inserted here and there. There is also a strong, albeit never explained element of what comes through as personal bitterness toward Merton (or perhaps Merton's reputation) by the author
which raises the question as to what the purpose was of the book
to begin with.

There are all kinds of interesting perspectives on the personal and spiritual complexities of Thomas Merton - Ed Rice's "The Man under the Sycamore Tree" written in the 60's (now out of print), Mott's definitive biography "The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton", the delightful Shannon book "Silent Lamp", Merton's own personal journals. Don't waste your time with this one.