- A feel-good land use/planning guide produced by the Conservation Fund and the Sonoran Institute. Examples show how communities can work together to protect parks and environmental refuges..

National parks and other public lands are big, fragile, economic engines for nearby gateway communities. In this book, communities and near-by public lands sometimes play nice together. The authors conclude: " . . . successful communities have transcended the 'growth versus no-growth' wars that characterize land-use policy in many cities and towns."

Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities is a must read for anyone who still believes that environmentalism and economic development are fundamentally opposed propositions. This book of case studies and analysis describes several successful ways in which communities created new jobs and economic opportunities while celebrating and protecting, rather than exploiting, their area's natural resources.

This book is so simple, yet it carries a lot valuable information. It begins like most books giving you the background of what Biztalk is and what it can do for real life situations.
Anyways, the samples are great intructional way for the reader to pick it up fast, only drawback is the section where it deals with the 'Receipts' which there is somoe error no the steps that bothered me. Besides this book would be my top pick for Biztalk.

This one is an impressive and detailed guide for the BizTalk developer. It starts from the basics but doesn't compromise on depth. The author makes good use of screenshots and schematic diagrams to dissect the complex flow of information through BizTalk, and gives plenty of examples of how to use it. He also goes beyond the core product to discuss the accelerators for RosettaNet and HIPAA. In addition to BizTalk itself, the book discusses integration with other Microsoft servers including Commerce Server, Application Center, and MOM. There's even coverage of BizTalk 2002. By the time you master everything in this book, you'll be a BizTalk pro.

I have been doing Biztalk work for 2 years. This one is one of the best that I read. Highly recommended!

A friend suggested that I take a look at this book. Different than the many books on ecommerce. The last chapter really brings the ideas together.

This book is an encyclopedia of metrics that business process owners care about, and a compendium of advice for measuring them. Don't let the title fool you - this book is as applicable to bricks and mortar businesses as it is to e-commerce sites. I can assure you that reading this book will give you insights into the minds of the business process owners for whom you exist to serve, and will impart a good appreciation of business imperatives.

What I like about this book, aside from what I've said above, is the way the authors analyze the technical and business factors. They start in Chapter 2 with a five-layer e-commerce model, then proceed in subsequent chapters to thoroughly dissect the model and how it applies to business types. This book only addresses technology as it relates to business issues. Chapter 3 illustrates this approach wherein the internet platform is placed into the context of cost/benefit issues. As such you'll get the technical details necessary to understand e-commerce infrastructure, but you'll never lose sight of the business imperatives. This is a refreshing approach, in my opinion, and the rest of the book is consistent with this.

Specific chapters that I particularly like include: (Ch 8) Customer Acquisition models, and (Ch 9) Application of Business models. These two chapters capture the essence of e-commerce. Another valuable part of the book is the appendix, which provides in tabular format real companies, their major and minor categories and revenue models. This is excellent research material that has been pre-compiled and will save you untold hours of research and classification as you benchmark your model against competitors and other business models.

Although I was unfamiliar with the authors and uncertain of the quality of theories/research, I was splendidly suprised and found this book to be a wonderful read. Not only were the theories challenging and stimulating, the author provided fascinating examples of the underlying principles of the book. I think that not only is this book a must read for internet professionals but for the avid business reader as well. The theories can be applied to all disciplines and the concise manner of this book makes it easy for all to understand.

The Internet is possibly the next discovery of fire, in terms of human impact. Instant, and potentially cost-free transfer of information TO all and any FROM all and any. A true equality of 'right to know'.
This book lays out the processes of how it came to be, and for that alone, it is an important work. It also sheds light on ways the Internet is in danger of controlling influences of business interests that may take away some of its most promising gifts.
The book is not an easy read, but is worth the effort.

Manuel Castells is, with no doubt, the leading figure in the sociology of information. That field has been the fastest rising area in the sociology. It deals with the interaction between IT, the economy, and society.
Manuel Castells secured his position with the book, ¡®The Information City¡¯ (1989). This book grounded the theoretical framework. His three volumes of ¡®Information Age¡¯ have been widely used as the textbook in the class. Those volumes have the rich depth and are well written, conclusive on each issue. But that trilogy is voluminous: about 1500 pages in total. If you prefer short but graphic, succinct introduction to the sociology of information, this is your pick. This book is based on the author¡¯s lecture held at Oxford Business School. So it¡¯s not conceived to be the systematic work but intended to orient the reader toward the basics of the field. He uses various live cases to illustrate the interaction between Internet, the economy, and society. The areas covered range from culture, new economy, virtual community, social movement, privacy, multimedia, and digital divide. Those are almost all topics tackled in the field. But this is not intended to set up serious theoretical basis in the field. If you are interested in such an attempt, I recommend James Slevin¡¯s ¡®The Internet and Society¡¯. But, as I mentioned in the review on that book, it requires the reader some basic understanding Giddens and other social theories, to get the nub of the book.

It is part of the conventional wisdom that the Internet affects all of our lives, is a key element in development of the 'new economy', and is becoming a major factor in political development. At the same time, how the Internet interacts with other influences and what social and technological trends are going on under the surface is not well understood. It is, however, so central to the development of our economy and society that it is essential to understand it.

Manuel Castells has produced a brilliant analysis of these issues. The book is written for both an academic and a general readership and meets the needs of both excellently, although some parts of it are reasonably hard work for the generalist. The reward, at least for this reader, is a far clearer understanding of the dynamics of development of our networked society and the issues that need to be confronted. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with economic or political development at any level from local community to global issues.

In style the book belongs to what I think of as the European tradition of clear and careful analysis and exposition, rather than the common American approach to business books of heavy reliance on drawing conclusions from examples derived from 'great name' companies. The result is a book that requires serious concentration in order to follow the complex, sometimes contradictory and paradoxical influences that the author elucidates for us.

It is directed primarily to the reader as citizen, rather than specifically aiming to help business people toward profitable application of Internet technology. In consequence, as well as providing a valuable overview of the dynamics of development of our national and global economy and society, it contains useful reflections on ethics and governance at the business level and also on the potential benefits and risks to the development of civil society nationally and internationally.

The author's starting point is that (the dot points following are slightly modified quotations excerpted from the 'Opening' to the book):
* The technology of the Internet provides the means of bringing together reliance on networks, dominant in private interaction, with the capacity for coordination of tasks and management of complexity, for which organizations have historically relied on hierarchical command and control.
* The logic, language and constraints of the Internet are not well understood beyond technological matters. Popular understanding is driven by myth, ideology and gossip more than by a realistic assessment of the issues.
* People, institutions, companies and society at large, transform technology by modifying and experimenting with it. The Internet transforms the way we communicate and do things and, by doing many things with the Internet, we transform the Internet itself.
* It follows that the Internet is a particularly malleable technology, susceptible of being deeply modified by its social practice, and leading to a whole range of potential social outcomes - to be discovered by experience, not proclaimed beforehand. Neither utopia nor dystopia, the Internet is the expression of ourselves - through a specific code of communication, which we must understand if we want to change our reality.

The first two chapters offer lessons from the history of the Internet and a description of the culture that gave rise to, and sustains it. Chapters 3 through 6 discuss e-business, the new economy, the concepts of virtual communities and networked society and key political issues of civil society, privacy and liberty. Chapter 7 is concerned with multimedia, while Chapters 8 and 9 are concerned with the geography of the Internet and the digital divide. There is an 8 page conclusion on the challenges of the network society, in which the mask of the analyst slips somewhat to reveal the passionate advocate of what Soros in The Crisis of Global Capitalism called the open society and to echo Laszlo's call in Macroshift for a 'fundamental revolution of consciousness'. Castells argues:

"Until we rebuild, both from the bottom up and from the top down, our institutions of governance and democracy, we will not be able to stand up to the fundamental challenges we are facing. And if democratic, political institutions cannot do it, no one else will or can."

This is a very good, practical book. I found it very readable, with just an appropriate level of textual detail in most cases. It's the first book I read which tries to tackle the problem of modelling and understanding Enterprise-level system interactions. If anything, Paul sells it a bit short by tying it to "e-Business", since a lot of the ideas and disciplines can apply to less forward-looking Enterprises who are trying to solve traditional integration problems but who may not identify with the e-Business tag.

The early part of the book discusses the principles of component-based development (CBD), and how this can be combined with process modelling to both help improve the business, and to provide a clear model for the systems needed to support it. Importantly, Paul sees the development of both business processes and systems as something which must happen progressively, so neither has to be the subject of "big bang" changes.

The next section of the book discusses the different types of components, and their role in a typical architecture comprised of both new and legacy systems. Paul then introduces his "CBD Process Framework", a way of defining components and then "provisioning" then by the most appropriate combination of new development, purchasing and re-using existing assets.

The core of the book takes a typical business process (car rental) and develops a worked example of the various business, logical and physical models which are required to define the component architecture. The models are each taken through several stages, corresponding to an evolving e-Business process and a system which is growing incrementally. This is much more realistic than presenting the final model "as is", and allows much better understanding of how the model develops. In many ways this is the part of the book which delivers the greatest real value.

The final part of the book discusses different provisioning and funding strategies for CBD, and how an e-Business team should be structured. There's a lot of good stuff here, which may be very useful to someone new to object- and component-based development. However if I'm honest I found this less useful, since there are better specialist books on this subject and it doesn't hold the interest as well as some of the earlier sections.

As an Appendix, Paul presents descriptions of all the major component technologies, and all the major UML-based modelling techniques. This could be a valuable reference for anyone.

I have one slight reservation on the book's core - Paul follows a convention in which an "interface" is a collection of types, and says that "by convention" the interface includes access to all the types. This is a bit different to the Microsoft model, for example, and may make it more difficult to establish good navigation around the object model, or to support "stateless" models. However, this is something to be aware of rather than something which should detract from what is otherwise a very useful tutorial.

I like this book. The worked examples of developing the e-Business model are excellent, so much so that I now recommend this book to anyone trying to model such things using UML.

...

When I got this book I was was amazed by how thin it was - a mere 230 pages. What made me frown even more, was that on first inspection I determined that only 175 pages was main text and the rest was appendices.

After reading the book I realize that it is above properties that help make it the excellent book it is. The appendices contain information about technologies (which could date quickly) and modeling techniques (which possibly don't become obsolete so quickly but could be supplemented as new techniques become available). This makes it a very easy read for people who are already familiar with the modeling techniques or technologies. It effectively removes the need to discuss too much about the diagrams in the text itself.

The main text moves fast, stays relevant and focused thus yielding a very thin (in typical IT terms!) book. It starts immediately by discussing e-commerce, its business relevance and discussing the issues of aligning business and technology.

The book particularly impress me by maintaining its business focus throughout. The development of components is tightly coupled to the business process that is being automated (or newly developed). In this respect it propagates an approach whereby a component-based architecture is incrementally developed. The focus continually stays with providing real value to the client.

Management issues (project management, ROI etc) are also addressed in the later chapters in the book and adds significant value to the text especially if read by potential project managers.

In my opinion the book is a must read for any prospective designer/developer/project manager of e-Business systems.

This book is a well written guide that crams a coherent approach to developing e-business systems into 233 pages.

The theme of this book is component-based development (CBD), which I personally found to be an effective way to design complex systems that can be implemented in a carefully managed manner. The concept of an architecture that is based on "plug-in" components is powerful in the abstract. Like many abstractions CBD could have remained as a theoretical approach had the author not skillfully laid out a map to transforming these abstractions into reality.

The book jumps right into aligning business to IT, making a business case for CBD, and how to plan e-business projects using a CBD approach. It then delves into details that clearly show this isn't another book on theory or unproven ideas.

What sets this book apart from many books on architecture is the fact that support and service delivery are interwoven into the approach, which takes architecture out of the realm of "ivory tower". The author's approach is pragmatic and remains focused on business requirements and delivering systems that have real value to end users. As such, this book provides invaluable advice on how to plan for operations, administration and maintenance of systems after they have been released into production.

While business and production issues receive thorough treatment, this book sticks with its theme by providing a realistic framework in which to design an architecture. It then shows how to use the design as the basis of e-business system development and deployment. This is reinforced by the way the book is laid out to support project stages and phases.

I discovered a lot of great ideas between the covers of this slim book making it, page for page, one of the most valuable books in my library.

Who needs this book? Architects and cheif technical officers, of course, but I think anyone who is assigned to manage development, testing and release of e-business systems should also read it. Project managers who are tasked with managing e-business implementation projects might find the information on managing e-business projects to be the difference between success and failure.

Though the plot was somewhat thin and didn't hold together all that well, what this book lacks in literary merit it more than makes up for with numbers.

Though there are plenty of large numbers, like 347,991, all the numbers you remember from childhood are also present. The number 9 is a scene-stealer, as usual. I'm told that the Count from Sesame Street had a hand in the editing, and I was able to detect his influence here and there.

My only suggestion is that there should be a character map at the begining of the book, like they have at the beginning of a play. Whenever the number 5.4% came up, I racked my brains trying to remember if that was the same 5.4% that had appeared a hundred pages ago as the unemployment rate. Or was it rate of increase in air pollution measurements over major urban areas? I don't know. But a quick character map would have cleared it right up, saving me a lot of flipping back and forth.

this is one of the best historical Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. that I have ever read. Its really takes adventure to the edge, escpecially when it gets to the health and nutrition section. I severely recomend taking a night out and reading this absolutely great literature.

No, you'll never use *all* the tables.

But, if you're ever interested in "the numbers", this book is usually the best place to start.

I think that should be the title of the book.
Ram & Sabine Reddy have written a practical handbook useful for all Managers, cutting across their specializations & levels. It offers a birds eye view without skipping the details. A book all Managers can use for practical & effective management of costs across the supply chain.

Ram's real life experience & Sabine's objective research & analysis make an ideal combination of theory & practice.
This book could be recommended as study material for IT/ Management students

Well laid out and written. Puts new concepts in easy to understand terms - for all levels of managers and from different supply chains. Worth the read.

"I found this book especially relevant in the current recessionary environment.
With companies struggling to retain their customer base, the
one area that can immediately affect the bottom-line is company's supply chain.
It is a must read for managers and "foot-soldiers" in modern
corporations who are under increasing pressure to reduce costs and improve profitability.
The book is written in a clear manner incorporating business
strategy, organizational, technology and implementation issues. The authors take a complex subject and present it in a manner that can be understood by managers from all areas within the firm - finance, manufacturing, sales, and IT.
Excellent read! - I recommend it highly."

I spent many hours with Lipnack & Stamps' Virtual Teams. Lipnack and Stamps are team consultants, and this book is one of their business cards. It's strong on axioms, moderate on bibliographic references, filled with trenchant observations derived from their consulting experiences, and written in a hurried style that reads like a draft or a condensed version of a larger book, despite its 300 pages. The authors provide dozens of taxonomies, some of which are useful and thought provoking, but most not deriving from research data. I obtained one item referenced in the bibliography, a middling-quality correlational study, but noticed the authors were quite creative in their interpretation of its results. Once you get past the aphoristic writing style ("Connected, linked, matrixed. We are the future now. . . Before we know it, 10-year-olds will be running the world. Perhaps they already are. . . The new virtual organizations are at once very old and very new, very small and very large . . . ") you'll find yourself reading many interesting nuggets of information combined with useful advice on how to build and manage a virtual team. I appreciated the fact that Lipnack and Stamps avoided treating the virtual team as a panacea or as a solution to team problems. Their cool approach to the formidable problems faced by distributed groups adroitly avoids the hype in which other authors engage. I also appreciated their extended discussions in the areas where virtual teams suffer the most, including trust and communication across time zones. Leadership got slight treatment, but perhaps for good reason-the DNA of effective leadership in general has yet to be cracked, and is a largely unexplored phenomenon in virtual teams.

Globalization can create as many problems as opportunities. One big problem is figuring out how to unite people worldwide to work on projects for your company. In an age that lacked a worldwide communications net, the answer would probably be quite depressing. However, as authors Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps make clear, the modern Internet makes it quite possible for workers all over the world to collaborate. The physical location of your firm’s various experts is no longer a barrier to effective team building, be they in Dublin, Bangalore, Las Vegas or Bangkok. In fact, the authors claim that companies that fail to create effective teams across cyberspace will be left in history’s dustbin. This might be overstating the case, but we [...] recommend this book for its candor about exactly how challenging it is to create virtual teams. Still interested? If so, this book serves as an excellent primer of both theory and practice.

The authors are convinced that, eventually, "virtual teams will become the natural way to work, nothing special. Virtual teams and networks -- effective, value-based, swiftly reconfiguring, cost-sensitive, and decentralized -- will profoundly reshape our shared world. As members of many virtual groups, we will contribute to these ephemeral webs of relationships that together weave our future." That day is already here for many people and I agree that virtual working relationships will soon be the rule rather than the exception. The authors correctly note that technology extends capabilities "but organizing to do things together is only human. The most profound change of the new millennium is in the way we're organized." Moreover, as more people connect online, "we increase our capacity for both independence and interdependence. Competition and cooperation both thrive in our new culture." However, there are perils to avoid because whatever goes wrong with in-the-same place teams can also go wrong with virtual teams -- only worse and, worse yet, faster and at a much greater cost.

The authors organize their excellent material within 14 chapters whose individual titles indicate each chapter's perspective on virtual teams: Why, Networks, Teams, Trust, Place, Time, Purpose, people, Links, Launch, Navigate, Theory, Think, and Future. I agree that a virtual team "is a group of people who work interdependently with a shared purpose across space, time, and organization boundaries." Nonetheless, I still have some quibbles about the authors' sequence of subject matter (not with the content itself) and am still convinced that cooperation between and among members of virtual teams is even more difficult than it is between and among those within physical boundaries. Moreover, my own rather extensive experience with all manner of corporate clients suggests that the most formidable barriers are between two ears. If you have some serious human barriers in your own organization, I urge you to check out O'Dell and Grayson's immensely thoughtful and practical book, If Only We Knew What We Know.

But please keep in mind that even if O'Dell, Grayson, Lipnack, and Stamps were retained to create virtual teams for your organization, unless and until everyone else involved buys into the enterprise, the results would be abysmal. Hence the importance of several points which Lipnack and Stamps make in the final chapter, notably the absolutely essential need for trust. "A presumption of trust enables a successful strategy of collaboration [enables everyone involved] to be better innovators, competitors, and survivors....If purpose is the glue, trust is the grease." I agree.

Of course, no single volume such as this can provide all the right answers but Lipnack and Stamps raise most (if not all) of the most important questions. Their answers seem sensible and practical. Of course, decision-makers must decide what the nature, extent, and duration of a virtual relationship should be in their organization at any given time. The authors do provide an excellent source of information and insight which can help virtually (pun intended) any organization increase cooperation and collaboration across boundaries through the effective use of various technologies. Especially, in this age of accelerating globalization, most organizations need all the help they can get.

Web Vision is not primarily a book about the Internet, the Web, e-business, or e-commerce; it is a vision of how these technologies will take society forward. The Internet is more than thirty years old and its technology is poised to enable society to take off in new directions. The book, Web Vision, explores these directions in logical and insightful ways. As one author put it, firms are beginning to realize that the real action in the web is yet to happen and is in digital space. The book is a good resource for those that want to develop strategies to position themselves or their organization to take advantage of these new opportunities.

The book is well thought out, well reasoned, and well presented; consequently it is easy to read and follow. The ideas presented are done in a straightforward non-technical non-threatening manner. The author uses his twenty-plus years of experience to provide pleasant compelling examples of how and why this "new" technology will impact us.

I found the chapters addressing work and virtual society to be particularly interesting. The author explores how cyber space can be used to create virtual offices, virtual meeting places, and virtual commuting, thereby providing a driving force in the next generation of work and play. The idea that technology can be used to help society's problems is well presented and appealing.

"Web Vision is an excellent tool for evaluating the possibilities of not only the Web and its future, but of its impact upon our lives."

For the last four years I have been concentrating on the technical aspects of Web development. This book provided me with the background and business perpective I was missing so I can relate the work I've done to the larger framework of e-business. I would highly recommend this book.