The information contained in this book helped me to see most of my employees through the anxiety and emotions related to our 4 rounds of lay-offs, building relocation, several successive changes in management and re-engineering of our department. The author presents practical information and realistic strategies that will assist management at all levels. I would recommend this to any supervisor or manager that would like to prepare employees for corporate change, both positive and negative.

This book helped me to support and reassure many of my employees, which resulted in lower rates of turn-over and higher productivity during stressful times of change and uncertainty.

Seeing the obvious "people breakage" of past changes, the President of the company bought the book for the senior staff to read and discuss so we'll be more skilled in change management.

The model is simple and yet powerful. I found myself doing a self-examination and applying it at home with my children. It will take some time to master the techniques and I'm optimistic it will greatly assist us with future corporate changes.

It's my intention to put together a training program for the entire company as it will help everyone better face business and personal change.

NIGHTKILL is a novel about a sniper for the Mob, who gets set-up, paralyzed and recovers through a "new" surgery, and enacts revenge against one of the players of the Mob. It is marketed as a medical thriller, but believe me, it's a thriller with an emphasis on some horrible outcomes. Jake Nacht is a sniper for the Mob. After 17 successive kills, he is set-up, shot and paralyzed by a crooked cop, who is in on the set-up. While recovering, Jake meets Angel, a beautiful nurse whos uncle just happens to be on the verge of a successful new surgery to fix paralysis. After the surgery Jake goes on a revenge mission to get who set him up. In the process Jake falls in love with Angel, who is now being held hostage by the bad guy. As you can tell by my synopsis, its kind of a paint-by-numbers scenario. Everything is familiar and done by rote. This is not to say that the book is unenjoyable. Far from it. It's full of action sequences but the main problem is there are no surprises...everything IS as it seems and we are just awaiting the final shoot of so we can move on to the next book on the shelves. Not a very distinguishing book. Not recommended.

A very fast paced book, Jake is a character with whom i expect to see several sequals, I`d rate the character to have the ability to compete with a Dirk Pitt,Lucas Davenport,and a John Becker......Need i say More...

BROS., THIS BOOK IS DEFINITELY WORTH YOUR TIME. JAKE NACHT IS THE BEST HIT MAN IN THE WORLD OF FICTION AND DESERVES TO BE READ. YOU SHOULD ALL SEE THE STRUGGLING FIGHT FOR LIFE AND DEATH BY JAKE NACHT. A REAL FAST-PACED BOOK THAT'S SURE TO KEEP YOU ON THE EDGE OF YOUR SEATS. HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS FOLKS THIS IS A BOOK THAT WILL BLOW YOU AWAY.

A High Performance Team. We all want one or want to be a part of one. This book tells you how to develop one. It begins by developing a Mission Statement and Vision Statement, discusses how to communicate the goals and objectives, and then discusses techniques for achieving the necessary buy-in from the team.

I am a mid-level manager. I recently joined a young telecom company and set about interviewing and hiring staff and coalescing them into a Team. This book helped refresh the process of developing and communicating "management vision."

For a mature manager - a dozen years experience of managing 12 to 40 people - this is a good refresher. For a younger manager recently promoted or just getting started, this is a must.

This book should be coupled with Winning Management by Wolf J. Rinke.

I read this book from front to back and found it a very good read. No doubt I will get even more out of it when I look at it again. The authors propose a holistic approach to the creation, development and nuture of high performance teams through participatory management. I was so impressed by their argument I have commended the book to my colleagues as a model we might follow in our soon to be started business.

I bought this book knowing it did not cover my particular engine, I was building a pontiac 455. The book does however cover the small block chevy, small block mopar and cleveland fords. He goes to great detail on how winning engines (he builds for nascar) are made. I was already familiar with race engine preperation, but found his guidance a very safe way to go for the guy who wants to pay attention to the details and build the best engine possible. I would say he stresses engine reliability over HP. If your serious about longevity then this book will help you.

It's a shame that Sun fellows can only come with so little material about Java performance.
Even JavaWorld articles contain more information about the subject. For example, when
talking about optimizing the serialization process all authors can offer is to set more
fields to be transient. Is that all you can think of ? How about custom writeObject, folks ?
When discussing data structures and algorithms all authors can say is "choose accordingly,
it depends". Oh, thank you, I didn't know that ..

Well, it seems to be that this books was written in a couple of days without any serious
research. Too poor and shallow. All I got from this book is a couple of facts
regarding GC, HotSpot and some other things I didn't know before. And first chapters described
the general tuning strategy pretty well, actually. But that's it. Shame on you, folks.
Just read "Java Performance Tuning" by Jack Shirazi if you have nothing to say.
Or at least make some Web-reserach before publishing a book.

I would definitely reccomend this book to someone who is not at all familiar with performance tactics in Java, but this book does not adds much to the much known tactics found on web or in the Dov Bulka's book.

Since this book was from Sun Press I definitely expected more from this book considering the depth provided by other books from them. But this book kinda embarrased me by reiterating the tricks already known and introducing the esoteric concept of benchmarking and not providing much details with it.

I hope somebody would come up with more exhaustive work in this field very soon....

There are a number of things everybody 'knows' about Java. Bad things such as "It's slow (but can be speeded up by calling native methods)" or good things such as "It doesn't leak memory". Unfortunately, like most things, the truth is more complicated.

Wilson and Kesselman have done an excellent job of getting under the bonnet (or hood for those in the US) of Java whilst firmly remaining practical rather than theoretical.

I bought the book because we suspected memory leakage problems in one of our applets but couldn't find much information on the subject elsewhere. The net result is that we've had our eyes opened to a number of issues we weren't aware of and have been able to tackle them with informed confidence rather than ill-educated guesswork.

A particular bonus is the information on benchmarking. So often we find we develop solutions on the basis of ease of coding rather than performance (not always bad thing). What I've found now is that I have greater confidence in both trying out different solutions and then concrete evidence with which I can justify my decisions to others.

Though not for beginners, I would reccommend this book as a good one for expanding your knowledge of how to deliver good, practical, faster and more robust Java. Being able to give sound background information on why you write a piece of code in a particular way is an important step on the way from being a developer to being a key developer.

Not much substance between the covers. Had hoped for something new, but didn't find it here.

I enjoyed the quotations and the spirit of the book. It was interesting to discover who the quotations were by. I particularlly liked the cartoons; they are a great asset to the book.

I thought this book was a great compilation of quotes and helpful sayings. Very uplifting and lighthearted!

Basically the author of this book is more of a kempo practitioner then a Shaolin master of the arts. The Chinese arts require a life time of dedecation and hard practice.
Mr. DeMasco in this book represents very poor stances and a very shallow input on the Chinese martial arts. When he executes a horse stance his butt sinks below his knees, which should never happen. In his crane stance his leg hangs straight down when it should angle slightly inward to protect the groin area. The Chinese cross stances are too elongated, which places unneeded stress on the knee joints. The back knee of the stance should be placed in the calf of the front leg to provide strength and stability in the stance. He also doesn't use proper stance names such as Chinese cross stance, Lady's Horse stance (Lor E'ge Ma). It seems he has had some training in Wah Lum Mantis and in black tiger, but not enough to be considered a Master in these arts.
As for his Shaolin certificate presented to him by Shi Yong-xin, all I can say is that money (if you have enough) can buy a lot of things.
Even some of the self-defense techniques (from a kempo standpoint) were executed poorly and wouldn't be the most effective of techniques.

I bought this book because I had read a bad opinion on amazon.com. I had read a previous article about Steve Demasco and his certification from the Abbott of the Shaolin temple. I was skeptical and I wanted to see for myself just how bad the book was.

The book lived up to my low expectations when I first saw it. It's a typical Ohara cookie-cutter book. The pictures are full body shots that are taken from a distance, which prevents you from seeing details, especially in the self-defense techniques, and the layout is unimaginative and predictable. I also found it hard to follow the "Iron Wire" form, which played such a pivotal role in his success at the temple.

But then I actually read the text. I was impressed with Mr. Demasco's sincerity. The little things that made him seem more real; like on the back cover where he lists his titles, there is a quote "These are titles I continue to earn." I particularly appreciated his retelling of his initial meeting with the Abbott of the Shaolin temple in ch.8. I was also struck by his honesty when he was reluctant to tell anyone about his certification. He was "certain that if this (certification) got out to martial artists, somehow they would find a way to discredit it."

I'm an experienced martial artist (I am not affiliated in any way with Mr. Demasco's system) with more than 15 years in the arts as well as a school owner. I have seen many fads in the arts and was skeptical of Mr. Demascos. But I found the book worth reading and even entertaining on a very human level. It's a story of his journey, successes, and mistakes. One that I think is easily relatable.

Although I would have appreciated some better technical pictures of his techniques, I feel it's a good addition to a martial artist's library. For it's human value, I gave it 4 stars.

This book, at first glance was poorly written, short, and boring. Of course all of my first impressions proved wrong in the end. I haven't been formerly trained in any Shaolin art, nor in most of the various Martial Arts available for general practice. However I can say I felt like he really knew what he was talking about. My studies really have been in the area of Jeet Kune Do, but also Karate to a point. I successfully found myself performing the short-forms, and understanding the Iron Wire without difficulty. People not experienced at all would find this book confusing, but upon reflection by someone familiar with Martial Arts it begins making sense. I originally thought "What can a small book like this contain?" Boy was I surprised at the level of detail actually shown in the photos, the simple direct methods for practice. Also I plan to buy his video series.... fore those of us not able to focuse entirely on fighting this makes a good point of forms exercise. I loved it personally and urge anyone to read it. Much better than the Shaolin 5 Animals Kung Fu book I bought earlier, that was laugh-able.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, a newsletter devoted to monitoring and exposing hate groups, has published an article on Steven Wilkins, the author of this book. A look at the article might help prospective buyers understand where Wilkins is coming from.

Modern evangelical Christians are quick to make absolute statements about the teaching in John 9:3 and assure us that when something bad happens God and sin had nothing to with it. But biblical Christians know that God works IN HISTORY with the nations covenantally (Deuteronomy 28). When buildings fall down, the humble, God-fearing man's first instinct is to question whether God is judging us. The proud fool says, without thinking about it, God is as sad as we are.
This book is a great step toward understanding the covenantal history and status of our country. The mess we are in will never be fixed by some great new church planting scheme or any other hairbrained ministry inovation. We must look to the old paths.
As has been stated, this issue is far more complicated than a small book like this can handle. A good way to look further into this subject would be to read the primary sources they site. Other sources that have helped me are Rousas Rushdoony's lecture series on American History and Wilkin/Wilson history conferences available at canonpress.org.

BTW - I expect the slanders to come from the unbelieving corners. But Christians who would accuse these men of being racist, white supremesists, or assume they have any similar agenda ought to be ashamed and repent of their slander.

A government-schooled person must start somewhere, and this short booklet is a great place to begin a search for truth. Read with an open mind and learn that lands are invaded for their wealth, and that politicians must always find a "moral" cause for their destruction. Let this be the first step in your search for truth, and then quickly move on to other such works such as "The Sterling Nobility of Robert E. Lee", also by one of the authors.