"This book covers an enormous amount of ground, starting with streams and sockets "

"My editors at 
O'Reilly (Jonathan Knudsen, Mike Loukides, and Robert Eckstein) have been patient and 
understanding people. They deserve a long and sustained round of applause."

Go ahead, applaud. Do it.

" 
 
A piece of code is said to block if it must wait for a resource to 
finish its job. For example, using the read( ) method to 
retrieve data from a file can force the method to halt 
execution until the target hard drive becomes available. 
Blocking can sometimes lead to undesirable results. If your 
code is waiting for a byte that will never come, the program 
has effectively crashed.  
 
"
"They penalize client mistakes. "

"1. Get a mutex associated to the account. If we can't, wait until we can.  
2. Make the withdrawal. 
3. Release the mutex."