Steve Irwin Books

Great book for providing a baseline for developing new products. New product examples are relevant and timely - so you'll actually know the products being discussed! One of the better text books, can actually read through it.

It's a detailed introduction for any product/brand manager. It precisely describes the processes, activities and tasks through which a new offering should be taken.

It is weak to overview the financial tools for quantitative decision making process, but on contrary it nicely insists on developing new product culture in the organization.

Without the clarification on value creation of the new offering, inexperienced product manager could be launching for the sake of activity, instead of capturing the incremental value added.

I liked the part on the launch. It is comprehensive and easy to make a checklist from.

Overall, I would caracterize the book a good buy for the novice to the field.

Many points/ideas are common sense.
Many points/ideas are repeated in multiple chapters.
It just uses too many words on simple topics.
This 550-page book can be easily rewritten in less than 100 pages.

The book is organized into five parts:

Part I - Overview and Opportunity Identification/Selection; includes an introductory section and The New Products Process, and Opportunity Identification and Selection.

Part II - Concept Generation; includes sections on Preparation and Alternatives, Problem-Based Ideation, Analytical Attribute Approaches.

Part III - Concept/Project Evaluation; includes sections on The Concept Evaluation System, Concept Testing, Full Screen, Sales Forecasting and Financial Analysis and Product Protocol.

Part IV - Development; includes sections on Design, Development Team Management, Special Issues in Development and Product Use Testing.

Part V - Launch; includes sections on Strategic Launch Planning, Implementation of the Strategic Plan, Market Testing, Launch Management and Public Policy Issues.

The book is a thorough overview of the product planning process, and a very useful validation for someone who had already been involved in product planning. The book could have been enriched considerably by the use of more case studies and examples. The Applications section at the end of each chapter was meant to be a method of reflecting upon and putting into practice some of the ideas learned in the chapter; but the questions were oddly written and there was no "answer key" or discussion of those questions, so I didn't find that section useful at all.

Let's face it, texts are not becoming any cheaper. While not escalating like tuitions, they are more than they used to be 20 years ago, inflation included. For that increased amount, the text better be damn good and chuck full of material to get the new student on the right path, and the professor on course with the latest material.

So does this book fit the bill? Yes and no. A lot of this is rehashed material from what I can see pertaining to methodology, but there is a strikingly large amount of mention to recent products. This may be because the book was originally written in 1983, with seven updates including the '06 version.

I am not an educator so will leave this one to the professionals to decide if the newer text warrants the wrath of the students for a new edition or not.

For educators and students and product managers who used to be engineers (there are more than you think out there).

Note: why do textbooks look like text books? The design is very 80's.

Take a look at www.coventry-collegiate.com. Understanding Business Statistics, the book featured there, is independently published and sells for only $39.95 (new). It is clear, extremely readable and very student-friendly.

This is a well written and illustrated text book that describes the working of statistics. Definitions are placed in boxs within the text so the defination of a term is where you read the uses of the term. Review questions are also place within the text so the question follows the definition and explation of the statitistical information being taught. The book also uses web sites for information and examples, software programs such as Excel, to add to the learning experience. Included is a CD with power point lessons, and sample quizes.

Yes, put all the extra features together, namely the student CD and the Visual Statistics together, this seems like a well-put-together solution for a beginner statistics course. However, it needs some help. The book could be more thoroughly indexed. Visual Statistics software does not work properly even with updates. Sentence such as "The mean of the sampling distribution of the sample mean is obtained by summing the various sample means and dividing the sum by the number of samples" is not intuitive. This book has potential to be great, but it will take better teaching techniques than complex statistics talk.

The book is essentially a standard introductory probability and statistics course, with an emphasis on the statistics. The business and economics in the title is mostly reflected in the examples given in the text, which have that orientation.

There is also no emphasis on formal proving of various maths results. The typical reader is not expected to be a maths major, and probably does not need it.

A useful feature is the CD that accompanies the book. It lets the reader easily use a computer to handle the tedious data inputting and number crunching.

This slim (maybe I should say "anorexic") book was certainly disappointing. What looks so colorful on its cover does not deliver in its pages what I expect as a reader. The product reminds me of a scrapbook - as though taking papers, making color copies of them, attaching type here and there, and then binding it all.

For the price, I didn't think this 30-40 page "book" was worth much. Readers looking for information about Steve and the Irwins will feel the book lacking, I believe, as I felt.

Wish it had been better--I had so looked forward to owning this one.

I found the Steve Irwin book by June Eding at a school Book Fair today and it's really delightful. An incredible amount of funny little facts about Australia and Steve and Bindi that my grandson loves. Did you know that a newborn koala is so tiny that it's only about the size of a jelly bean? The writing and photographs teach in a very interesting way, and it keeps Steve Irwin's passions alive.

REASONABLE PRICE FOR A QUALITY BOOK WITH A LOT OF NICE PHOTOS AND GREAT STORY. SUPER FAST SHIPPING, AS ALWAYS! WE BOUGHT ENOUGH OF THESE FOR THE WHOLE KINDERGARTEN CLASS TO CELEBRATE STEVE IRWIN DAY ON NOV. 15TH. WE ARE HAVING A WILDLIFE WARRIOR KHAKI DAY CELEBRATION. THE KIDS ARE LEARNING ABOUT HIS IMPORTANT MESSAGES TO SAVE OUR PLANET, ENVIRONMENT AND OUR ANIMALS. STEVE'S LESSONS LIVE ON THROUGH US AND THIS BOOK IS A NICE START TO ANY CHILD'S LIBRARY. WE DONATED A FEW TO ALL THE K CLASSROOMS AND THE SCHOOL LIBRARY. THERE ARE A FEW BOOKS ON STEVE, BUT THIS ONE SEEMED THE MOST APPROPRIATE FOR THE 5-6 YR OLD. THEY EXERCISE IN THE MORNING TO BINDI AND THE CROC MEN TAPES TOO! WE LOVE POSITIVE INFLUENCES IN OUR CHILDREN'S LIVES. THANKS.