Another item I have found very helpful especially when soldering lots of components on a commercial PCB with solder mask is an inexpensive toaster oven. I bought one from Wal Mart for about $20, and it works amazingly well. I apply solder paste to the pads with a small hypodermic syringe and place the components with tweezers. You do not need to be real accurate in placement. Then I place the boards in the oven and turn on the power on high setting. I watch the solder until it turns from black to shiny, and turn off the power and let it cool. The components will self-align when the solder starts to flow, and most bridges between leads on IC's will vanish like magic. Sometimes it is necessary to touch up a joint or two, or maybe fix a bridge, but it is amazing how well this works. I even used a thermocouple and timer to plot a temperature profile for the oven heating and cooling. It compared very well to the recommended profiles used in real soldering ovens. Probably the biggest fault is that the center of the oven heated up a little faster than around the perimeter, but I suspect most ovens do that. There are a bunch of websites offering more details on the cheap toaster oven technique.
This does not work very well if you lack soldermask to keep the solder isolated to only the pads, and then hand soldering is my preferred method.