Practitioners Books

For anyone looking for information or just curious about the economic effects of privatization, Prajapati Trivedi's book is a fascinating manual for practitioners. Being an Economics major in college, I truly appreciate the information provided by this world-class economist and brilliant educator.

Privatization has become a popular strategy to promote economic development in emerging, developing, and developed economies. Despite the growing trend towards privatization and all the valuable ideas and literature generated by privatization experts, little attention has been devoted to the actual implementation and completion of privatization transactions. "How to Implement Privatization Transactions" filled this gap... with brilliance! Trivedi has brought to bear his considerable experience and expertise in chapters by answering critically important questions such as: How to prepare a public announcement for inviting expressions of interest? How to prepare a request for proposal? How to organize a preproposal bidders conference? How to organize evaluation of bids? How to prepare a position paper on strategic options for privatization? Trivedi goes a step further than most in his penultimate chapter by dealing with select issues related to implementation of a proposed privatization transaction. This 250 page practical guide is an easy read, and is expertly packaged with sample forms and tables; sample outlines and documents; sample prequalification advertisements; as well as "how-to-information" that guides step-by-step those charged with implementing privatization transactions. This is an essential and invaluable guide to public policymakers, as well as those attending or organizing privatization training programs and those who serve as privatization consultants. Highly recommended!

Praja Trivedi once again wrote a very important book which needs to be at the fingertips of all privatizers (those working for the governments, development agencies and/or the private sector) so that they can all follow this meticulously explained and yet user friendly road map to get good results. Moreover, the politicians, members of the media and even the ordinary citizens in privatizing countries would benefit enormously from reading this book if they are willing to understand the best practice process and become better informed and equipped to support or intervene if things go wrong. I wish I had a book like that to follow earlier in my career. But it is never too late. I am grateful for Trivedi's continued willingness and energy to share his expertise.

Many of the techniques used in this book's hardware/software waterfall project to make it succeed, are also used in agile software development to help them succeed. People skills, frequent feedback, keeping in touch with reality. I loved the humor and compassion exhibited by the authors. I recommend this to practitioners of Scrum, Extreme Programming, and other agile methods to provide a perspective on a real-life waterfall project and problems common to all development projects.

Excellent material, well written and cogently organized. Reads like a Steve McConnell book, but at a more general "Project Management" level instead of "Software Project Management". Loaded with funny (in hind sight *grin*) stories that make the major points very memorable.

I related to many of the stories (they read very much like AntiPatterns), and I gained important insights into a current critical project -- which is having immediate positive impact on my current planning and actions.

Very glad I read this book in time.

Strongly recommend this book for current and future project/program leaders!

"It Sounded Good When I Started" sounded equally good when I finished reading it.

This is a book about project management, not as it should be, but as it is: confused, satisfying, creative, mundane, exciting, demanding and chaotic. Built around the authors' adventures with a real, large scale project named Delphi, one feels as if she/he is working with the them and their very human cohorts as they cope with problems of enormous complexity.

The chapter titles themselves should give a flavor of the book:
"Digging Yourself into a Hole,""Going Where Angels Fear to Tread: There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing," and "A Charlatan in Expert's Clothing: Writing a Lie - The Proposal..."
being typical examples.

Each chapter concludes with "clinical" phrases such as, "The Dog Ate My Plan" or "I Wasn't Involved," that serve as warnings, in everyday language, that something is amiss. The warnings are then followed by very useful "bullets" that suggest ways for coping with the "dog" or the excuses one gives for his/her participation in a phase of the project that ended in failure.

A highly readable book, it should be of interest to all people who are engaged in project management, whether the project involves creating a piece of multi-million dollar electronic equipment or planning a extended family reunion of relatives who are ambivalent about getting together.

Dr. Katz has done both the medical community and patients a great service by writing Nutrition in Clinical Practice. This book offers the layperson a surprisingly readable, painstakingly detailed overview of the role nutrition plays in health and disease. Anyone interested in knowing why good diet is so important should read this book.

For the physician or nutritionist, this book is an essential tool for incorporating the latest research into your nutritional interventions. For students, Dr. Katz's work will be a highlight of their curriculum.

A very thorough and thoughtful discussion of nutrition that is ideally suited to the needs of the primary care provider. The CLINICAL HIGHLIGHTS feature at the end of each chapter is especially useful, but the final section, PRINCIPLES OF DIETARY COUNSELING, is worth getting the book for all by itself. Knowing about healthful nutrition is the easy part - getting our patients to adopt healthful eating habits is what's difficult. This approach to the problem of behavioral change is the best I have seen.

Based on 15 years of clinical practice in Internal and Preventive Medicine, this text is specifically designed for the practicing clinician, yet is accessible to the educated lay reader. It is comprehensive, with topics ranging from obesity and cardiovascular disease, to aging, cognition, early development, and the menstrual cycle. Comprehensive, extensively referenced and carefully evidence-based, the book is concise and practical. This book should be of interest to any clinician wishing to address diet and health effectively in the course of clinical practice, as well as to any patient wanting authoritative information on nutritional health.

I got this textbook as a required book in my NP program. I have used it since then as a reference in clinical practice. The doctors in my office also use it as a concise, easy to use source of information. It includes details of therapy including price, that might be outdated by now but that at least provide information for comparison.

Robinson's Primary Care Across the Lifespan was first recommended on an NP listserv as "the book to have". I bought it right off the press and have used it as an essential reference. This book is one that you will pull off the shelf everyday, whether student or practitioner. It should be the primary text for FNP's for years to come!

Bottom line: If you are an FNP, or just want a great text for primary care, this is it. I promise you, you will use this book and wear it out.

Primary Care Across the Lifespan was first recommended to me when I first became a nurse practitioner student at Georgia State University. Numerous books had been recommended throughout my program, but I found this particular text to be most helpful. It is concise, well organized and easy to use. Being a family nurse practitoner student, it was excellent because it focused on "care across the lifespan". I highly recommend this book and am grateful to that wonderful instructor who had recommended it me.

Principles of Forecasting is not a collection of articles describing basic forecasting methods. Instead, 40 authors have used a common format of identifying if-then principles and the support for those principles. Some other common formats of the chapters are: (1) limitations (2) implications for practitioners (3) implications for researchers.

The final chapter of this book contains 139 forecasting principles...

An example of a forecasting principle is: “13.25 Use multiple measures of accuracy”. A primary use for such principles would be as checklists for software developers, researchers, and practitioners to be sure that their work is complete to this level of detail. These are important general principles. Forecasters will need to use other references for the details of forecasting methods.

The Web site for this book is a very valuable resource for forecasters. Some of the resources are: (1) forecasting dictionary [Enter a forecasting term and the Web site returns a definition.] (2) links to forecasting software sites (3) links to forecasting books and reviews (3) links to bibliographies, abstracts, and (for subscribers) full text papers (4) links to conferences on forecasting (5) links to Web sites related to forecasting.

Throughout my career, it seemed every five years or so, I briefly strayed from risk analysis into a closely related field, such as weather reporting or stock picking, just to see what others were doing. Most recently, I won a jackpot in return for the effort. I read J.Scott Armstrong's "Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners."

Risk analysis has dealt more with subjects like natural and technological disasters. Business forecasting resembled risk analysis in several ways, but over the years, enterprise and capital markets accumulated much more extensive data. Social scientists studied the process of (and procedures for) forecasting with financial data intensively. Small wonder, as poor forecasting often led to costly disasters.

The authors wrote the Handbook in clear, coherent prose. It assembled 29 articles by 40 leading experts into an excellent book with 18 chapters. Armstrong, the editor (and clearly the instigator) created a hierarchical framework that described the relationships between different kinds of forecasting information, beginning with either judgmental or statistical sources. "Principles of Forecasting" illustrated this framework in an often repeated diagram.

The framework contributed to a coherent structure. Each chapter described one compartment within the framework. Each had an introduction that described the limitations and uses of a source of data used by forecasters. Each article also started with an abstract. Thus, a reader could quickly survey all of forecasting by skimming through the Handbook and reading either the article abstracts or the chapter introductions.

Instead of reading the text sequentially, the framework and the Handbook's structure also allowed finding a specific article (or a topic of interest within an article) quickly, yet staying oriented to the overall subject. Thus, "Principles of Forecasting" served a handy reference text. The organization and a competent index sped this application.

Many articles were excellent. None were less than very good. The articles concentrated on principles within subdomains of forecasting, which the Handbook emphasized by setting the principles apart in bullet format and bold text. The articles had a common format, which included two useful implication sections, separately for practitioners and for researchers. The articles also had overall summaries, and references to the literature. The authors edited each other's articles, which imposed both high quality and consistency on the Handbook. In addition, an extensive group of outside experts reviewed the articles. This huge effort showed in both dense information content and readability of the articles.

Similarly, the Handbook contained a separate and marvelous "Forecasting Dictionary" toward the end, which allowed quick reference to (and understanding of) separate ideas involved in competent forecasting. In another separate section toward the end of the Handbook, a "Forecasting Standards Checklist" gathered all of the principles from the separate articles and condensed them into a very useful guide.

"Principles of Forecasting" appeared comprehensive in its coverage. The authors wrote it as an explanation of a field, instead of a group of individual articles about related subjects. An introduction and a summary at the beginning and end of the book, also helped orient me to the overall subject of forecasting and to the need for principles. I thought that the Handbook reflected the consistent objective of a group of experts to interpret and explain forecasting. So, I will recommend it as a textbook for classroom use.

"Principles of Forecasting" is not for everyone. It is an expert text. However, for persons involved in (or hoping to become involved in) forecasting or its allied and subsidiary fields, such risk analysis or econometrics, it will prove indispensable.

The subtitle of this book, A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners, too narrowly defines the audience for Armstrong's new reference. Principles of Forecasting is, in fact, an indispensable resource for managers and professionals of every ilk. Forecasting is an integral part of decisions that we make and that are made for us. To be good decision makers and citizens we owe it to ourselves and others both to make our forecasts explicit and to examine the quality of those forecasts. This book gives the guidance to ensure that best practices are followed and to judge forecast quality after the fact

Principles of Forecasting is not a book that you will find in airport bookstores. It is not a popular management title that dishes-up the latest buzzwords. On the contrary, this book will give you knowledge to examine critically the fashions and fads, as well as the received wisdom, of management. And yet, despite being a serious work, the book is a joy to read at length, or to browse. I suspect many decision makers will tend to do the latter.

The Forecasting Dictionary is part of Principles of Forecasting and is a good place to start some directed browsing. For example, experienced decision makers will often rely on their intuition, even for important decisions. Is that a good idea? The Forecasting Dictionary has an entry for "intuition" that tells us, "... it is difficult to find published studies in which intuition is superior to structured judgment". Highlighted terms, such as "structured judgment" in the preceding passage, indicate that there is a separate Dictionary entry for the term. By following the highlighted terms and the references to the body of the book which are included in Dictionary entries, one can quickly pick up a useful understanding of a topic. Some entries are very detailed.

Following the intuition entry to the entry on structured judgement, one finds "role playing" as an approach to imposing structure on a forecasting problem. Role-play forecasting for conflict situations happens to be an interest of mine. There is a chapter on role-playing in Principles of Forecasting that provides evidence that the outcomes of role-plays by students, and other non- representative role-players, provide accurate forecasts of decisions in real conflicts. This is counter-intuitive given that the conflicts examined involved generals, chief executives, directors, and union leaders among others. Moreover, unaided judgment tends to do poorly by comparison. This has important implications for strategy development - after all, what use is a strategy that fails to forecast accurately how other parties will behave?

I keep my copy of Principles of Forecasting handy, refer to it often, and learn something new every time I do so. How many books could one say that of? A precious few. Congratulations to the authors on a unique and valuable work well executed.

This book has been a great help to me in my practice. It came in the condition promised and I am happy with my purchase.

This of one of the few books that really lives up to its potential. Particularly for the new practitioner, it will be a big help for in-office procedures. The explanations are clear, concise, and very easy to understand. The illustrations are exactly what you want to see. My only criticism of the book is that I don't like the spiral binding.

This of one of the few books that really lives up to its potential. Particularly for the new practitioner, it will be a big help for in-office procedures. The explanations are clear, concise, and very easy to understand. The illustrations are exactly what you want to see. My only criticism of the book is that I don't like the spiral binding.

I have read a few other options books for "practitioners" and this book is the best. Very practical and usable. In fact, I read it in small pieces and still get a lot out of it. I thank the others for sparing us on the theory and not trying to sell something.

Dr. Kodukula and his associate have written a concise, understandable and interesting book discussing project valuation. I routinely recommend this book to my associates and students, and higly recommend it for students in the MBA tract.

Starting with an introduction to the real options analysis the authors take us through the traditional project valuations tools (which is a bonus) to the process used to value projects using real options analysis, on the way explaining the methods and computational techniques employed to solve real option problems and how real options analysis supplements the traditional tools.

The detailed solutions provided for the various examples using ample figures and tables really help in understanding the application of real options analysis technique to project valuation.

This book will be of great help to corporate executives, senior managers, portfolio, program and project managers who want to go beyond the application of traditional tools of project valuation, searching for newer techniques.

This is the book for those serious about improving project selection results. This is the only book of its kind for today's project management professional. Finally, I feel I understand how to use this unique approach to evaluate all the options available in selecting projects that will significantly contribute to an organization's bottom line.

Lee R. Lambert, A Founder of PMP

As a social worker and educator, I highly recommend this fantastic book. The author clearly explains the many ways in which helpers are at risk for compassion fatigue and burnout due to the intensity of their work lives. He also provides many useful tips for preventing burnout. This is a very infomative and practical resource. I use it frequently to inform my own teaching of compassion fatigue, vicarious traumatization, and burnout issues.

This book is indeed practical in its application and theoretical enough to be able to us it as a text book for students. I recommend it for professionals and students who are in any type of helping industry in order to be informed of the very real risks involved to one's own health and welfare when giving so much of ourselves to others. This book is sorely needed in the areas of church ministry where there is a great emphasis on helping our fellow man but often pastors and lay workers are burnt out through lack of know how and knowledge to care for themselves because of the high demands of their congregations. Although not intended by the author to be used as a religious text as such it has invaluable insight which corelates to the 'other' types of caring that is done in community life.

I found this book to greatly reduce my anxiety as it addressed all of my worries and other issues that were leading me towards burnout. It also has clear indications that it will continue to be useful as I move further into my career. This is a book I plan to read again and again.

The best part of this book was Dr. Baetjer's explanation of software as a capital good and the knowledge component of capital goods. Drawing on a rich economic tradition, he indicates that software provides a clear example of how the value of capital goods rests in embodied, unarticulated knowledge. Not only does he make this argument convincingly, he makes it clearly. I am neither an economist nor a software engineer, but found even the most difficult economic concepts relatively easy to grasp because of how he articulates them; they are made clear and concise without being dumbed-down for a lay audience. Dr. Baetjer brilliantly applies earlier theories of capital goods to the new field of software engineering.

If this sort of material interests you, I recommend:
Howard Baetjer, Review of Austrian Economics, "Capital as Embodied Knowledge: Some Implications for the Theory of Economic Growth," vol. 13 #2, September 2000
Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, 1980 (or the 1996 edition)

Just the first chapter's examples of the capital structure of knowledge is worth the price of the book. In many ways software development went through its own communism, long documents, plan the whole thing before you do it, waterfall blah blah. All the Agile stuff, quick prototying , using prototyping to gather requirements, a discovery procedure... The root of all this lies in understanding the capital structure of knowledge.

Howard Baetjer, Jr., takes the reader through a highly informative and thought-provoking lesson in the economics of software engineering. Building on the solid theoretical work of the economists of the Austrian school, he identifies (through solid and thorough industry research) a number of problem areas in the existing marketplace for software, and offers viable solutions to each.

One need be neither an economist nor a software designer to gain usable knowledge from this book; its principles are applicable to any field. Baetjer does a superb job of fully explaining the underlying theories upon which he builds his thesis, using examples from other industries which make the more abstruse subject matter much easier to understand.

Regardless of your field, you will benefit from reading this well-written book.

Well, this work is truly expansive. It covers an analysis of what software engineering is, straight from the horses mouth: Prof. Bauer provides a paper here. Bauer coined the term in the first place, the fact that he contributes here is an indication of how excellent all 45 papers are.

Tom DeMarco and Frederick Brooks' contributions to the Software Project Management topic are essential reading for every project manager. Other notable contributors are Pressman, Boehm and Parnas. This collection guides the professional through development models, requirements specification, coding, testing, maintenance and development technologies, to name a few.

If you have a professional interest in improving the development of software, and avoiding over budget, late and deficient systems, you should start here, and not continue until you've finished reading the book. If you only buy one book on software engineering, make it this one. Warning: this collection is not for beginning students or people with a passing interest, it is written at the graduate student / scientific level.

I ordered this collection after discovering Thayer's "Software Engineering Project Management" collection. I was not disappointed. This is a "must have" for anybody teaching classes in Software Engineering.

This book accululates the classic works of the accepted authorities in the field of Software Engineering. As a senior consultant for government and industry for software productivity improvement, I continuously refer to and recommend this book to my clients and co-workers. This book should be required reading for every computer science, MIS professional. Thank you for the effort it took to bring this all together.