I bought this book because I had a positive experience with the Hong Kong version (which is substantially better) during a trip 5 years ago. I did not expect much from this book, but it managed to disappoint anyway. The writing style is so conversational and unstructured that it quickly becomes annoying.

I could put up with the writing style if it was not so obvious that the author was filling space to make up for the lack of content. Basically, if you plan to shop for designer clothes and purses in the big cities and want to know where the designer stores are, then you might get some use out of this. Beyond that, the content is severely limited. Probably the worst example I can think of involves an outlet store. The author admits that she could not even find the place, yet she still included it in her book!

I just returned from Italy and used this book almost every day. We loved the directions for finding great bathrooms. This book is not just about shopping but tells you all the hints you wish other guide books would tell you. It's very practical and best of all small and light. Her suggestion about how to reach your hotel from the train station in Venice was the best. Thanks for such a great little helper.

A must-have for serious shoppers! I was so engrossed in this book I did not notice my plane was delayed on the runway 1 1/2 hours. The attention to detail was impeccable; I used the maps to plan a different shopping trip every day, making the best use of time. Thanks to the tips, I was able to shop on Via della Spiga without maxing out my Visa. Advice like this is indispensable; I was able to bring home the perfect souvenir for everyone and stock up on leather goods during July sales for Xmas gifts. The Born to Shop series allows me to look forward to business trips and constructively deal with jet lag. I earned a Ph.D. in Italian designers, and Peck and Frette linens are among my passions all thanks to this book!

This book made me remember what [was] explained to me once years back. That fashion reflects society's mindset. This book does a brilliant job telling the business story of the Gap while helping explaining what was going on in American society at the same time. When we become used to something, we forget what it was like without it: before ATMs were introduced in the mid-1980s, we had to think about how much cash we'd need for that week, then go to the bank and cash a check. It seems so archaic now the ubiquitous nature of ATMs. But the changes that the Gap wrought -- music in the stores, being able to help yourself (and not having a sales clerk show items behind cases), and incorporating elements of pop culture's sensibilities revolutionized merchandising. How ATMs changed the way we bank, the Gap changed the way we shop ... and this book is the authoritative business story of that seismic mindset in American retail.

This book came out in September 2001 and the author predicted that Mickey Drexler had to go. Then yesterday Mickey Drexler resigns! He saw this coming months before anyone on Wall Street did - I was blown away. This shows what a thorough analysis of the Gap, how it started with one store and grew to more than 4,200, and how it changed merchandising in America. This is a compelling book -- good luck to the Gap. They should hire the author to replace Mickey Drexler.

INTO does a terrific job of explaining how Don Fisher at the Gap pioneered using pop culture in retailing. It often takes someone who's not in a given feel to "break out of the box." Fisher, a real estate developer by profession, had no background in merchandising. That's probably why he "revolutionized" retailing -- first by modeling the Gap stores on the Sonny & Cher show, and then by co-opting pop culture. But as we know, Gap's done poorly -- and INTO explains where it lost its focus in the 1990s. This is a fascinating discussion.

Brill, Brill and Feigenbaum's "Investing with Your Values" has been greeted with three cheers from the Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) community. It deserves perhaps two of the three. It aspires to be both a pragmatic handbook for SRI and the bible of the movement. As a handbook it is excellent. As a bible it is weak.

The book is divided into four large sections, of which the second and third are the most valuable. In Section II, the authors do an excellent job of describing the entire range of SRI activities: avoidance screening, affirmative screening, shareholder activism, and community investing. They lay out the strategies of each, explain the thinking behind them, and discuss issues readers should consider concerning them. For most people, SRI means little more than avoidance screening: refusing to own stocks in tobacco, alcohol, gambling, weapons or nuclear energy companies. The other approaches - all, if anything, more politically productive - have never, to my knowledge, been as fully and usefully presented as they are here.

The authors also do an excellent job of debunking the myth that investing along ethical lines lowers returns. Nobody who invested in the Pax World Fund, the Domini Social Index, or the Citizen Funds over the past several years will be found wringing their hands over missing gains. Socially screened funds have matched or outrun their unscreened competitors consistently. It's nice to see this myth laid to rest with a systematic barrage of pertinent research.

Section Three covers different kinds of investments: mutual funds, closed-end funds, stock, bonds, annuities, etc. The section also includes a catalog of socially screened mutual funds, complete with expense and performance data. This section, along with the many appendices, makes the book an excellent reference for the Responsible Investor.

In Sections II and III, the authors are writing within their expertise. Throughout the book, however, the authors slide from finances and investing into pure discussions of politics, ethics, and spirituality, and the results are always disappointing. When they're discussing SRI, they qualify as lucid, informed experts; when they discuss philosophy, theology, and politics, they're amateurs at best. Section IV spirals deep into New Age pretension and silliness. Even their preferred term for the SRI movement, "Natural Investing," is trendy, ill-conceived cant. (The English and Canadians call it "Ethical Investing," which is less coy and more accurate.) The authors pay lip service to the ancient roots of SRI, but they try to create new roots for it in New Age "spirituality." This tendency reaches its nadir when they rename the "voluntary simplicity" movement "voluntary abundance." Henry David Thoreau and John Woolman would cringe at the smarmy hypocrisy of the term.

Despite the weakness of their philosophizing, however, the book deserves applause for the amount of information on Ethical Investing it presents and the clarity with which it's presented. Despite its flaws, Responsible Investors should buy, read, and keep the book on hand. Or lend it around. Or put a copy in your church library and tell people it's there.

In a future revision, the authors should drop Section IV in its entirety and beef up Section III, on personal finance. They could write an excellent general introduction to personal finance - a "how-to" for nervous, well-meaning beginners - set in the context of SRI. These authors could improve an already fine book if they would take up this challenge.

Investing with Your Values does an admirable job of covering all the various aspects of socially responsible investing, but unfortunately it's not that fun to read. Enthusiasm is great, but the book has a gee-whizish tone, which I found grating (call me a sourpuss). I preferred The Mindful Money Guide, which covered most of the same material more succinctly and gracefully while also making me laugh. Still, if you're looking for comprehensive coverage of socially responsible investing, Investing with Your Values is a good reference.

This book documents how to earn competitive returns with investments that 'do good'. That helped me quickly educate my investment advisor to my preferences for values-based investing.

"Leaving Reality Behind.." is a myopic and biased account of a subject that just isn't that interesting. Unless you were one of the eToys.com employees or one of the 'cutting-edge European artists' of etoy, the 'Toywar' was quite simply a non-event for the rest of the planet. In essence, the authors (who clearly are sided and likely involved with the etoy camp) are trying to dress up a relatively trivial legal dispute over a domain name that is now about three years old. Why is this interesting?? Throw another 'yet-another-dotcom-story' on the pile.

There was a time when people were just starting e-mail and the World Wide Web, and had no real idea what sort of life the internet was going to bring forth. In the early 1990s, there weren't many rules, and commercial use of the Web had not taken it over. In 1995, an anarchic group of seven Swiss artists started the site www.etoy.com. In 1997, a billion-dollar firm to sell toys via the internet started up, registering as www.etoys.com. Two years later, eToys sued etoy for damaging the eToys trademark. The resulting fracas is told in an entertaining story that is not just a dot-com bust parable, _Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace_ (Ecco) by Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler. The earnestness and foolishness and greed herein described are universal; the contemporary surroundings of this tale, however, have much to tell us about the founding philosophy of the internet and its commercial future.

The artists involved in etoy had worked on collaborative digital art projects, and developed their site as a parody of internet business. They issued shares, and strangely, the share certificates were art works on their own; etoy did not manufacture toys or anything, but it did sell shares, and the shares (or art) did sell. They mocked executive appearances, adopting orange flight jackets, black pants, and shaved heads as uniforms. They intended to be "the First Street Gang of the Information Super Data Highway." Official company communications were signed, "etoy, leaving reality behind." Of course, commercial dot-coms were leaving reality behind in their own fashion. The story of eToys is told just as fully in this book as that of etoy, and it is just as strange. eToys was one of the first companies that emerged from idealab!, a business that was going to produce businesses just like McDonald produced hamburgers. eToys was supposed to beat Toys-R-Us by making it easy to shop without the brats. In 1999, the all important Initial Public Offering of eToys stock was made, amid furious excitement built up over the previous months, but eToys was in big trouble. That didn't stop it from trying to crush the annoying etoy gang. Even after a judge granted an injunction to shut down etoy, etoy wasn't weren't going to give in, and netizens all over began a "Toywar" to "Save etoy now!" A year after doing all the bullying, eToys was bankrupt.

Wishart and Bochsler not only have written a fun and rather exciting tale full of interesting characters, but they have also given a capsule history of the internet. There are detours here to explain the origins of the Web itself, and how different coding standards were developed to tie all our computers together. The first search engines are here, and the mechanics of the organizations who are supposed to control web names. This is an amusing story, and the book will be an excellent reference for those in the future who want to understand what the beginning internet was like and what the dot-com boom-and-bust was all about.

In years to come when they're teaching the history of the internet in all its aspects at colleges this book will be one of a hand-full of books that will be essential reading.

There have been lots of "I was there" internet books - some early ones like "Burn Rate" were truly excellent accounts of life at the coal face but more recent titles such as "Dot.bomb" were dull reads that neither entertained nor informed. "Leaving Reality Behind" is different in that neither of the authors are telling their own story but rather reporting back on the events that helped define and shape the evolution of this internet thing. Both funny and intelligent this book stands out for the thoroughness of its research (in the rush to get them out many internet books have suffered from sloppy editing and factual inaccuracies) as is witnessed by its excellent bibliography - probably worth the cover price alone for anyone serious about understanding recent digital history.

Finally, in bringing together the European and American sides of the story there are deep insites offered in the differences and similarities that bind the two continents together - particularly pertinent at the moment.

I'm perhaps too much of a dummy for this book, but even I realized that the '98 edition seems somewhat outdated in the networking game. Still, it did help reinforce some concepts.

I won't be able to give up on our networking consultant just yet.

This book is perfect for both novice and experienced user alike! It's content is "Right on Target" for small companies getting into this important area! I found it extreemly informative!

I'm a small business owner and I had pretty much given up on understanding networking until someone recommended this book. In a nutshell, if you're not a PC expert but you're smart and you need to set up a network for your office, buy this book. You probably won't do all the work yourself, nor should you, but this book helped me understand the key decisions and what to outsource.

Aside from the offical IBM documentation, this is the only third party book on the IBM Net.Commerce product.

The author is very knowledgable on the product and provides an excellent, must have reference for anyone using Net.Commerce.

I used this book to assist with my studying for the certification and as a result scored very well and feel I have expert level knowledge of the Net.Commerce system.

This book is not for beginner level users, it's designed for intermediate level users, to take full advantage of all the material presented here you should know C++ (at least three chapters cover customizing the Net.Commerce system using C++), you also should know HTML and exposer to IBM's Net.Data is nice (although she does provide a very good tutorial on Net.Data).

We have used this rev of the book extsnsively in our consulting practice. The book has been great to be able to determine functionality that the product can supply and then some examples on implementation. Now.. we are considering purchasing more copies of the book as our business expands around this product. We need to know if and when a new edition will be published that will encompass the new version of the software so we can proceed with more book purchases.

I used this book and the IBM certification guide to prepare and pass the Net.Commerce exam. However, I must point out that the timebomb version of Net.Commerce included can only be installed before year 2000, therefore, you must change your computer time to setup. It takes me 4 whole days to find out this.

This has got to be the most boring book in the world!!!! I have to read it for one of my college courses and it is very nauseating. 30 pages on the history of window decorations!! Give me a break! If you're into analyzing the advertising industry, try Social Communications in Advertising by Leiss. Its a much better book and its much more interesting!

In William Leach's Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture the author ignores the topic of leisure by making it self-evident through consumerism. Leisure, and in turn consumerism, became actual businesses to the likes of the Straus Brothers and Marshall Field, as well as to by-products of consumer industries such as banks, hotels, and museums. Leach's book brings the nature of leisure full circle, from Veblen's Leisure Class to leisure of the working class, whose consumption boosted businesses that used working-class techniques based in the theatre and vaudeville as "showmanship" in the shop window.

A landmark work, LAND OF DESIRE by William Leach traces the spectacular rise of the consumer economy from 1880s to 1915. What's surprising about this genealogy of consumer culture is that so many of the contradictions of life in America --being asked to think of oneself in cold economic terms, (training oneself out for the marketplace, being efficient, punctual, and, enterprising at work) while at the same time being asked to surrender one's inhibitions and spend, spend, spend, have been there since the beginning. It has changed little, but we have.

Consumer credit starts in late 1800s, along with advertising, along with the whole notion of "customer service," (borrowed from Christian service and debased by capitalists), bogus "profit sharing" programs to mollify workers (but only under the threat of union organizing). The turn of the century store owners created consumption palaces (like today's malls) to facilitate profligacy (moving seamstresses off the main selling floor so as not to interfere with the fetishistic fantasy goods, a strategy which finds its current expression in sweat shops well off the premises in the Third World). They spread the Parisian idea of fashion from the realm of clothing to every kind of consumer product. And marketing hasn't changed one bit since then either. One department store used a kind of "Sprint Friends and Family" promotion in 1910 to get people to volunteer likely friends for charge accounts.

Leach identifies three matters he believes are central to the why and how the culture of consumer capitalism came to be the way it is: 1) the development of a new commercial aesthetic (the visual materials of desire such as lights, color and glass), 2) the collaboration among economic and non-economic institutions (an interlocking circuit of department stores, investment banks, hotel chains, and the entertainment industry, but also museums, and universities, 3) the growth of a new class of workers he calls the "brokers: admen, lawyers, investment bankers, museum curators, magazine editors, and experts of all sorts. By 1895, in Leach's words, they had "injected a new 'amorality' into American life, indifferent to virtue and hospitable to the ongoing inflation of desire." According to Emily Fog Mead, an ad expert (and mother of Margaret), writing in an economics journal in 1901: "Accompanying all the early stages of innovation is a fear of wrong-doing, of disloyalty to ideals, and of the coming destruction of the foundation of society; but the next generation has no conscientious misgivings."

Leach notes that this new regime required new ideological underpinnings. Simon Patten, a turn of the century economist, provided them. As the leading light of Wharton's new school of business (yet another invention of this era), he argued that in the new world of mass-produced consumer goods, economic theories of scarcity were anachronistic. This effectively scuttled the writings of Ricardo and Smith, and allowed the new view that mass-manufactured goods and their ready availability would serve to create a standardized set of desires, a common language of aspiration, and thus ameliorate the small differences between immigrants, the poor, the Negro. In other words, Patten equated material "goods" with the social "goods." This blurring of the two has been going ever since. Quoting Leach, quoting historian of religion Joseph Harountunian on this point: "The 'good' is not in goods. The good is in justice, mercy, and peace. It is in consistency and integrity, in living according to truth and to right. It inheres in men and not in things. It is other than the goodness of goods and without it goods are not good."

Leach also identifies elements of America's earlier civic mythology that were appropriated by the new consumer ideologues: 1) The cult of the New. Phrases like New World, New Heaven on Earth, New Nation (conceived in liberty) were common currency in American since its founding (Emerson, Whitman, Douglass espoused versions of the New) As Leach notes: "By the end of the century, however, commercial capitalism had latched onto the cult of the new, fully identified with it and taken it over." "Fashion and style were at the center, expropriating folk design and image, reducing custom to mere surface and appearance."..."Market capitalism [esp. this most radical aspect of it] subverted whatever custom, value or folk idea [that] came with in reach. No religious tradition had the power to resist it, no immigrant culture."

2) "The Idea of Democracy, like the idea of the New and the idea of Paradise (also part of the American mythos and contained within America's millenialist yearnings), began to change under the influence of the new industrial economy. "Gradually, wealth lay less in land and more in capital or in the money required to produce new goods. This pecuniary wealth was owned by a small minority; but at the same time, growing numbers of Americans were losing control of their work, becoming dependent on others --on the owners of capital--for their wages and well-being." "This fostered a double-sided conception of the democracy of desire. It stressed the diffusion of comfort and prosperity not merely as a part of the American experience, but instead as its centerpiece." "...The 'free-market' would allocate to Americans an infinitely growing supply of goods and services. American culture after 1880 -- children as well as adults, men and women, black and white -- would have the same right as individuals to desire, long for, and wish for whatever they pleased."

There was resistance to these appropriations, but eventually "material desires and pecuniary values came to constitute the base measure for all other values, even for ''the dim inner world by which men judge what is for them worthwhile.' Eventually, everyone signed on: Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce in the Twenties greatly expanded the Department of Commerce to help business, to provide "statistics" and "strategies" for the spread of consumer capitalism all over American and all over the world. Sadly, since then, the business of America has become its only business. A truly remarkable book.

Very academic book. It has some good content, but it lacks appropriate implmentation experience to round the content of the book. It gets boring at times. I have no doubts that future books on the topic will be far superior

Seems like this book was published on May 2000. How were some of these reviews made before that date?...

The book was very helpful for me to understand b2b e-coomerce and gave me great ideas, with which I could make business plans. The book use 8 cases to explain business models and marketing strategies related in b2b e-commerce. And I think that I can use the models and marketing strategies in Korean e-commerce market.

i seen that other people had good marks to say about this book, and one had adverse things to say about it, take my advise either borrow it from a friend, or look at a salvage book store, save your money, give it to charity!

Whether you see the Internet as a business venture, or simply wish to find out more as a new user, 'Marketing on the Internet' is a delightful book to read. Its logical structure takes you through an overview of the subject right onto specifics on using the Internet as a marketing tool... leading onto ways and means of doing business on the world wide web. What's more, the authors have taken care to cover issues such as security and privacy, which are crucial to any e-commerce transaction. There's also a section on creating your own web site, which can help small businesses in getting their venture going. With its huge list of online resources available to draw additional information from, this book is an "everything you wanted to know" book about marketing on the Internet. Don't let its bulky textbook format put you off. Read it if you want to get 'into' the Net.

I have read now numerous internet marketing books and this one is still the best. This was the first internet marketing book and created what we now think of as "the standards" for internet marketing. Brilliant. Read this one if you read any of them.

I thought I would be spending 21 days learning Visual Studio .NET, instead I have been spending much of the time working around bugs in the code examples. All of the code listings are suppose to have both VB.NET and C# listings. In one case there was no C# listing and converting the VB.NET code to C# was not easy. In another case an error in both the VB.NET and C# listing resulted in a form that had bogus data displayed and this form was shown in the book! This book is not for the beginner. It assumes you have a basic knowledge of SQL Server and XML. It lacks organization. Very poorly proofread.

This is the best book for Visual Studio.NET beginner. Just as the book's title, you really can learn VS.net in 21 days.
The first seven days are awesome. Even if you never use any version of VS before or totally have no idea about the .NET concept. After reading the first week's contents, you would feel like you really get into the zone of .NET framework and vs.NET.
The second week, it mainly talk about ADO.net, XML, and the programming languages. I was a bit disappointed about this part. ADO.net is much more complicated than the first week's basic stuffs, and the author was trying to make the completeness, squashed most of major features of ADO.net in just 2-3 days. So from this point, we have to forgive him. (there is a lot of good ADO.net books in the market, go get one if you want to go further. I bought the MS ADO.net core reference) The last seven days talks about some advanced features (some of them only available in vs.net enterprise edition)or third party addons of VS.net, such as, crystal report, application center test, and sourcesafe. This information is good references for expericenced vs.NET users. (but it's a little bit too much for beginners).
Like all tech books, there are some errors in this book, especially in the second week.
Overall, I got what I paid for. The book brought me in the vs.NET door. I give 3 stars for it. (I take two stars off because of the second week and the errors)

5 stars for this book! I needed to quickly learn how to use .NET and Visual Studio .NET and I am SO glad that I found this book in the multitudes of .NET books that are out there. This book is simply outstanding! I really appreciated how this author could take sometimes such complex topics and make them easy to understand and quite to the point. The great thing is that if you want to learn .NET (windows forms or asp.net) in either vb.net or C# then this book is the one to get to get you going and put you on the right path. Great job.