I agree with every sentence of acmuller's review. However, this collection of essays can hardly be appreciated without having read "The Awakening of Mahayana Faith", translated by D.T. Suzuki in 1900. This difficult text attempted to re-introduce Indian concepts to Chinese Buddhism, which had become loaded with Confucian and Taoist ideas. "Pruning" works at trying to untangle the resulting mess of metaphysical contradictions and their (apparent) consequences. Fun reading, but my time spent on these two books would have been more constructively applied on my meditation cushion. My final conclusion is that the entire discourse plows into matters that The Buddha repeatedly treated with silence. The redeeming value of "Pruning" is that it demonstrates the value and methods of modern scholarship in the never-ending process of developing Right View in our practice.

Although Buddhist thought is ostensibly grounded in a refusal to admit the reality of underlying, permanent "essences," such as a self (atman), the Buddhist tradition has continually struggled against the re-emergence of atman-like concepts in other forms. This tendency has been noted in the context of the notions of Tathagatagarbha and Buddha-nature, which came to hold great sway in East Asian Buddhism. The question is, does the appearance of such concepts represent a real break from the orthodox Buddhist tradition? Or does the East Asian tradition possess its own paradigms that allow such concepts to operate in an acceptably Buddhist manner? The editors have here selected a number of articles by leading Buddhist scholars treating this issue from various angles--an unusual treat for scholars of Buddhist thought. Please read this work for yourself, and take the chance to form your own views on this seminal problematic Buddhist issue. by Charles Muller, author of "The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment

For developers involved with web-based projects, whether it be an online store for electronic commerce or an Intranet site for accessing and modifying company data, the powerful blend of JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technologies can really make life simple. Once you've mastered them, creating new components that encapsulate business logic, or new web interfaces to existing systems, is easy. The trick, for developers, is mastering the technologies.

Professional JSP is one way to get up to speed. Like many of the books published by Wrox Press, Professional JSP covers a specific technology in-depth, as well as the various ancillary topics relating to it such as databases, servlets, and XML. While not every developer will need every web technology covered by the book (and there are many), the book works both as a tutorial to cover the basics and a reference for technologies that you may encounter later.

Professional JSP starts by covering the basics of Java Server Pages, and how they relate to other web technologies. Embedded in HTML pages, JSP provides an easy mechanism for creating interactive web interfaces that draws on server-side components, known as Enterprise JavaBeans. While the presentation logic is written in JSP, the processing occurs within these JavaBean components. The book takes a balanced approach, covering both JSP and its syntax, as well as how to write and interact with JavaBeans to perform useful tasks, like accessing databases through JDBC and using other Java technologies. However, if you've read other Wrox titles, you may find there is some overlap in the topics covered.

One of the nice things about Professional JSP is that, in addition to covering theory, it goes further and examines practical applications of JSP, and issues for programmers like security and debugging. Like other titles in the Professional series, there are case studies of real projects using JSP and related technologies. My favorite would have to be the case study on porting Active Server Pages to JSP -- something that is extremely important for developers with "legacy" web systems. On the whole, Professional JSP is an excellent book for web developers wanting to get up to speed with Java Server Pages, web development, and Enterprise JavaBeans. However, developers with less of a web presentation focus and more of back-end server view may also want to consider the excellent Professional Java Server Programming title, which also covers JSP. -- David Reilly, reviewed for the Java Coffee Break

This book covers the chapters in a very structured way. It starts with a concise description of the JSP Basics with a detailed explanation of the concepts. It explains all the concepts in a very clear and simple words supported by an equally clear Comments and examples. Any body with a little of Java experience can become very familiar with the JSP syntax and concepts by reading first few chapters. It covers all the necessary JSP syntax for building a small web application to a very large distributed Application. It also explains about the way the JSP pages are processed by different web servers. For example it explains about the various methods available to maintain a persistence session and their merits and demerits. This is the first book in JSP series that explains not only the concepts of JSP and how effectively one can use them with the help of this book. It also covers various other topics like EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, XSLT and WML in very detailed way. Overall I feel this is the greatest JSP book ever published so far. I could build a simple and robust JSP Web application by reading the first few chapters in a short period of time.

This books lives up to its title in that it provides both real-world JSP techniques (through 7 very informative case studies chapters), as well as JSP background information that serves as a quick start guide. I rank it as one of the top 2 JSP books currently available (the other one is Web Development With JavaServer Pages by Messrs. Fields and Kolb).

After the JSP fundamentals are out of the way (which I am sure any JSP newcomer will appreciate and can benefit from), the book picks up pace with discussion on JDBC connection pooling, and the best practice for data access from JSP. Then comes the chapter on custom tags. My favorite chapters are the ones on debugging JSP's and implementing the MVC design pattern in JSP/servlets.

The case studies are very comprehensive and closely correlated to the earlier chapters. In one case study the design methodology is clearly explained with UML diagrams, which are very helpful to someone who is currently architecting an enterprise Java Web application. Other case studies cover such a wide area of topics such as JSP in combination with LDAP, EJB, XSL, and WAP.

For ASP developers, this books has two enormously useful chapters to get them started on JSP right away. One is a case study showing how to port an ASP app to JSP, and the other compares and contrasts the object model and syntax between ASP and JSP.

Having said all the above, this book does suffer from certain weaknesses. One is typical of any multi-author book, i.e., repeat of the same topic in different chapters. This is the case with JDBC, which shows up in both chapters 4 and 7. Another problem is the lack of the use of a standard servlet/JSP container, which will help new users to run all samples under the same software setting (although there is an appendix on setting up Tomcat server). Finally, a few chapters seem to be out of place in term of the logic flow of concept, such as the ones on dynamic GUI's and JNDI.

Finally, this book is still thin on heavy-duty J2EE topics, such as EJB, distributed transactions, message service, and interoperability with CORBA. This is why I consider it as an intermediate level book, not an advanced one. Hopefully we will see another Wrox book in the near future that addresses some of these issues.

Most of this book expands on topics of no interest to anyone who has a life. The prose is dense and hard to take. There are many technical details no one in their right mind would care about, even slightly.

You would think such a title would, at least, have its share of useful information. Trust me, it's slim pickings.

Out of 1160 pages of text, there are three on startup problems. Basically, you are told to start in Safe Mode. If you can't, good luck!

An example of the type of help you can expect is on page 20 of Chapter One (introductory material): "A value could tell you which interrupt and I/O port settings a piece of hardware uses. Suffice it to say that you'll find the value you need by using the keys, but you'll find the actual information you need by reading the values. There are three types of values: binary, string, and DWORD. Usually, only applications use the binary and DWORD value types. Values usually store configuration data in a format that can't be understood by humans."

I will modestly add, the way the early topics are explained is truly extraterrestrial. But for people who usually reside on this planet (as, I think, I do) this book is to be avoided. I kick myself for having wasted hours trying to follow the first two hundred or so pages.

This book would do well in a competition for the worst book ever written in the English language. I recommend it as a collector's item for that reason.

The authors got me up and running very fast. I didn't care all that much about details at first and this book avoided those details until later. The best thing it did at first was get me on the Internet with few hassles.

The power primers helped get my overloaded and underpowered system running better. I don't have the money to upgrade my system every few months, so getting the most out of what I have now is very important.

Once I did run into problems with my machine, the various theory and troubleshooting sections helped a lot. I found Chapter 15 especially helpful when I couldn't get games to run properly. The material on DirectX was great, even if it is a little out of date.

So, if you're looking for a book that's going to give you everything you need, try this one. I found that it really helped me when I needed it.

John Mueller and this book have saved me more hours of grief with Windows 95 than I could have imagined any one book would do. For example, when I needed some recommendation about how to keep my machine running correctly, I found everything I needed. There are sections on backup, regular maintenance like diagnostics and disk optimization, and some simple troubleshooting. I also found sections on the use of various files that other books don't even hint at. One such example appears in Chapter 9 where the author explains what the various compatibility files like Autoexec.bat are used for.

This book is a tad theory heavy, but even here the author excels. I now know how various parts of Windows 95 operate, making it much easier for me to diagnose problems with my system. The clear and easy to understand diagrams are a real plus. Again, the author lists filenames in the theory section. These file listings recently helped me fix a problem DLL (also known as DLL hell) by simply copying a new version of the DLL over the old one.

One of the authors, John Mueller, thoughtfully left his email address as part of the About the Author. I contacted him and found him extremely helpful and thoughtful of my concerns. Even though Windows 95 is old news, the author spent considerable time helping me use his book more effectively and even helped me around some problems areas within the book.

About the only two problems with this book are the index (not the author's fault since the publisher puts this together for him) and the lack of new hardware information. However, considering this book was put out before much of the modern hardware appeared on the scene, I can hardly blame the author for this oversight. My only thought is that he should keep the book up-to-date better for those of us who are still using Windows 95 and not filling Microsoft's pockets by buying Windows 98.

If you want a complete history of the Microsoft operating system, this is the book for you. It also gives a overview of the system and can help you see how the parts are connected. Unfortanetly, it seems to be written for someone who is upgrading from DOS V.1. The authors seem most concerned with getting old DOS programs and old hardware to work in Windows 98 and assume that anyone with new components and windows programs will never have a problem. This is not true!

The book assumes you are already familier with the old diagnostic tools. For example, it tells you that the untility Dr Watson is much improved but only hints at what the utility does and gives no instruction for using it. (you will not find Dr Watson on the start menu so new users will not be able to even open it.)

I bought the book mainly because I have a software problem with my new computer. This book told me about starting in safe mode and went on to say that if that did not work the problem could be very difficult to track down. Thank you Mr Norton.

Fortanetly.

Despite the fact that Millenium and Win2K have been released, for support folks the version of Windows we most often encounter is still Win98. This book has just about everything you need to know about Windows 98 right there between the covers.

Unlike one of the other previous reviewers, I found the background and theory portions of the book to be incredibly useful in figuring out just what has gotten out of whack with a system that is giving me fits. The explanations of memory usage, peripheral drivers, and FAT32 should be required reading for anyone who does more than word processing on their computer.

The plus of buying this book is that you get a lot of useful information. There were few questions that I couldn't answer by reading a bit. I found that the information was much better organized than the Microsoft documentation and more complete as well.

In addition, the author provides really good productivity tips that have made working with Windows a pleasant experience. I usually don't have a lot of time to waste getting things done, so anything that helps me work more efficiently is welcome.

The big negative for this book is that the author spends a lot of time discussing theory. He'll talk about how things work for pages at a time. While this is OK if you have a lot of time to read, it's time consuming to dig through pages of theory to find the one piece of useful information you need. I did find the theory useful, so I can't say the author was completely wrong in adding it to the book, I just wish all of the theory had been included in separate sections so I could ignore it.

I gave the book five stars because it is an essential reference despite the organizational flaws. Any book that can fix as many problems as this one can deserves high marks. Perhaps the author will include less theory the next time around.

This is a solid reference book for those doing primarily Forms development, but it lacks quite a little in the Reports department. If you're buying it for Reports development, as I did, you'll be disappointed. I have yet to find a very good Reports reference. That said, this is probably the best one out there. The book contains something like 70% - 30% Forms info to Reports info (and that may be a little generous). It does have a few good examples and is an easy read.

READ THIS BOOK. You may understand what subclassing means and how object libraries work, but you'll have a hard time being productive if you don't understand how they best work together.

Wish I had this book before beginning my latest project. It has changed the way I look at Forms and Reports development.

Every so often a single book will define the way a tool will be used by everybody for a long time. 'Developer Advanced Forms and Reports' is that kind of book.

As a longtime Oracle DBA and a long-ago SQL*Forms developer, I was called upon to create an infrastructure for Oracle-based applications development. I knew all the Forms concepts, but desperately needed as quick a jumpstart as I could get to make it all work together. This book provided that jump with detailed instructions and examples.

I really think this book will become _the_ standard methodology for Oracle Developer developers everywhere.

Congratulations - and many thanks - to Dr. Dorsey and Mr. Koletzke for a job very well done.

As a means to understand how to use the Developer 2000 series of programs, this book lacks detail or explanation. It tries to straddle a description of methodology and that of program function, and does a poor job of the latter.

We already have a good understanding of how to get the job done -- we just wanted to use the tool. Thus, we only skimmed the parts of the book we considered were just a tepid introduction to Yourdon.

If you already comfortable with task analysis, problem decomposition, and normalization, and simply want to know how to use this tool to develop a system, move on to something more practical, such as "Rapid Application Development With Oracle Designer/2000" by Chris Billings, et.al.

Dr. Dorsey and Mr. Koletzke set out to show how designer 2000 could be used in the context of an overall system development effort. As an experienced designer 2000 user, this is what makes the book the most useful to me. Not only do the authors show how to use the various parts of designer effectively, they provide a list of the missing parts - things that should be done in a good system development effort but which are not included in Designer 2000.

I would recommend this book to: 1) persons with some designer experience who are attempting to use designer 2000 for serious development efforts; 2) teachers in an advanced database design class; and 3) anybody interesting in understanding the role of software design tools in modern software practice. Novices will need to spend some time working with the tool, performing the designer tutorial that comes with designer, and perhaps reading some of the other literature on database design such as Date's "An Introduction to Database Systems".

Excellent book. I cannot wait for the authors to produce another edition to cover Designer 2000 version 2.1.

I've read every book about Designer that I can get may hands on and this is The Best of Breed in my opinion. The book is really 2 books in 1; an excellent description of Designer and an equally excellent explanation of a methodology in which the tools can be used. This combination of conceptual clarity and practical application is unique and provides a "forest AND the trees" approach that makes reading and re-reading the book and outstanding learning experience. I can't wait for the next iteration!

This volume, an update of an earlier work by the late Peter Bebblewaite, is little more than an obsolete exercise in wishful thinking by the Catholic radical left. For the book to be at all relevant, it needs to be updated again, to reflect the changes in the College of Cardinals (fairly significant in the last few years). Even such an update would do little to further recommend it, as there are other, more recent and less biased works on the same subject.

Give this one a miss.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the first half where past conclaves in history are discussed. Some of the history is really fascinating. Although the tone of the book optimistically predicts a less severe papacy next time around, there is little evidence presented to back this up. The criticisms of John Paul II, while quite accurate, do little to help us understand who we might expect as the next pope. It is a well written book and very readable, but as time continues to go by and the current pope continues to live, the latter section on potential popes becomes less and less relevant due to the age restriction and deaths. Still, there is enough here to recommend a read.

"The Next Pope", though quite out of date now, is a very good and comprehensive study of the Catholic Church and how Popes are elected, and an attempt to give an idea of who the next Pope will in fact be.

It covers, very well and in quite clear language, a history of the papacy from the time of Pius VIII (1829 to 1830) up to John Paul II's historically crucial letter "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis". Each conclave in that period is discussed very well and with quite reasonable language that I have found very helpful in gaining an understanding of where the papacy has travelled in recent centuries.

The next part of the book looks at John Paull II and explains his thought. It does an easy-to-understand job that could, I feel, give a better understanding of his Polish nature.

The last part written before Peter's death deals with "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" and the reaction to it, however it fails unfortunately to reach the notes of Ratzinger about the infallibility of the document and to explain in simple, if for many harsh, language what this will mean for the next centuries of the Catholic Church.

Margaret's article is a very detailed (compared to her late husband's) analysis of the College Of Cardinals as it was comprised in 2000.

Though this is now completely out-of-date, contrary to what others have said about Margaret's writings, I find her very balanced in her exceedingly sensible admission that the next Pope can only be just as conservative as Wojtyla. She is very willing to face and accept the fact that many cardinal want an even more conservative papacy in the future, and looks at such cardinals as Dario Castrillon Hoyos and Rouco Vadela as possibilities for the next Pope.

My main criticism of Margaret is that her language is so unclear and that she seem incomplete - it is as if one would need a detailed analysis of those cardinals who nobody, outside or inside the Vatican, would consider as possibilities for the papacy.

Though out of date, this contains some useful information.

for the promising title, I bought the book immediately after the release. I hoped to find much about the web technologies, esp. JSP applications, but found only 50 pages telling the same thing with the help files. Again waiting for another release of JDeveloper for a new book.. I think the book is specially written for the Developer users for the migration, it has far missing topics..

The flow of topics is not so good. Chapter 2 was out of place. Choice of examples was also not good. It does not Cover EJB or CORBA objects only covers BC4J. Hands on trials will allow you to deploy and test specific examples, but you dont gain enough knowledge from the experiment to be comfortable with JDeveloper.

The book provides a good overview of the JDeveloper product including some of the future direction. It is primarilly made up of exercises which walk you through using the most important feature of JDeveloper, the BC4J wizards. The main reason for using JDeveloper is as an Oracle database web application tool and this introduces the overall concepts. While the book is pretty basic on coverage of web techniques (book on JDeveloper not web), it still covers many concepts through the exercises.

It is SIGNIFICANTLY better than last JDeveloper book which was useless.

Fr. Richard McBrien is a well-known cleric who has made a career of public dissent in the Church. If this is the position he wishes to take, that is his business. However, when he purports to write a history of the papacy, is it too much to expect precisely that?

Instead, McBrien has provided several hundred pages of typical, tiresome "Catholic" dissent badly disguised as a history book. As a non-Roman Catholic clergyman, historian and theologian, I find that very unfortunate.

For a far better book from an academic perspective, I would suggest Dr. Owen Chadwick's Oxford Dictionary of the Popes as a much more valuable reference tool.

McBrien tries to compress almoat 2,000 years of religious, social and political history into one volume and does a pretty solid job. He gives anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few pages on the over 260 popes throughout history, with the bulk of his text spread out over the popes of the 20th century.

For the most part, McBrien looks at the popes with a scholarly and critical eye, describing how most of the popes throughout history were preoccupied with political and military matters rather than spiritual ones.

However, he does drift from a scholarly, critical examination from time to time. For example, I thought that he was improperly airing out his theological complaints against the current pope in his section on John Paul II (McBrien is theology chairman at Notre Dame), but I enjoyed his passage about the much-beloved pope, John XXIII. (can someone out there recommend any good books on this pope?)

McBrien ends this reference work with some papal facts, like "best and worst" and "firsts and lasts" and has a chronological list, as well as an alphabetical list, of the popes. However, my favorite parts of this book were the introductions to each chronological period of papal history. McBrien gives a general picture of the mood of the day and how each pope dealt with military, political (and sometimes spiritual) issues of the day. He also takes a look at internal church politics and stresses that throughout history, popes were sometimes under control of kings, emperors, powerful families and groups of bishops and clergy.

I've even used this book to settle barroom discussions over popes and in August, 2002, when the press began to ask if Pope John Paul II was going to resign, I referenced this book when people were asking me if other popes have resigned in the past (they did, BTW).

The book is a solid reference if you someone asks you who Pope Eugenius or Sixtus II was, and when they were popes. Since McBrien had 2,000 years of history to cover, it piqued my curiosity to learn more about these fascinating individuals and the times in which they lived.

This book is the most important among my vast library of papal history books because McBrien includes many facts about the popes that I have only been able to find in obscure books. He lets us know who is favorite and least favorite popes are, but that helps to give a more personal approach to this topic, which is refreshing in that most informational (particularly historical) books tend to be so dry. This is an excellent sourcebook for those interested in papal history and can easily be read from cover to cover without the reader ever getting bored with the text. McBrien is an excellent writer and this is by far the most well-written, interesting, and informative books on the subject of popes that is readily available.

These two men look normal and speak normally, which is more than can be said of most Bible prophecy people - just read the other two reviews!!!! Their book is interesting and makes a good case for the present time being the "end times" - however, only time will tell if they are accurate.

This book is excelent and it cunningly fits right into the crevise between my cheeks. I would recommend it to anyone and would also suggest some other reading - "Beelzebub - My true Story" - J R R Phartley, "That God guy, what a wuss" - B L Zeubb , "How to succeed in Life (by getting your head out of your nether parts)" - W R T Gubbins, ", "How to get rid of piles using execrable reading material" - Big Black God.

I honestly have never read anything quite like this book and I can honestly say that it opened my eyes! This Satan guy is one twisted s.o.b. though not half as wired as the doomsday twins from Wackedoutville. People believe this stuff, some of them might even be able to read. Oy-oy the world is truely coming to an end. Well, hopefully for some of these nutters.

The Spirit of Dark Angel called "Deccal" will born in a human body with order of God after the last saint is dead. And Deccal will born in China and speak Chinese. He will bring the supreme destruction (I guess it is 3rd World WAR)and blood will be one till a powerful saint called "Mehti" reborn to destroy Dark Angel and bring peace to humanity. But as u can guess billions of organisms will die because of Deccal. "Mehti" The saver will reborn as a king of an Arabic Kingdom after Deccal. The point is the last saint in the world has born and alive for now. When he dies, Deccal will born and I guess only about 100 hundred years left to total destruction so start to pray for your souls and if you are interested in , to learn more about read the holy book of muslims called "Kur-an'i Kerim".