Practitioners Books

This is a wonderful addition to our office library of reference materials. My CNM/WHNP colleagues have overviewed it and find it very helpful on those hard to manage patients.

This book served a vital purpose in what I'm having to achieve in clinical. I'm just now doing my OB-GYN rotation and I think this book is great. It has already helped me with what I need to know. OB-GYN is not my strong point, but this book has provided me with easy to understand, experience based information right at my fingertip.

This book was a required purchase for our NP program...and it was well worth what I paid. The insight and easy reading was invaluable during my OBGYN rotation. Highly recommend this one as reference if not required reading for your program.

A tremendous discussion and reference of the nuts and bolts for all kinds of teaming in the IT world. It's loaded with nuances related to teaming that you won't easily find in one place. It's also a good review, thinker, and is exceptionally well researched and written. I definitely reccomend this book to anyone who is serious about adding to their skills in this often overlooked but necessary specialty.

This book is a comprehensive analysis of the points throughout development life cycles where team collaboration is appropriate for creating deliverables. Formats and methods for conducting team workshops are set out in great detail, based on the organizational environment, project type, end result desired, and particular phase of the life cycle. Jones proposes a "framework" for development which he calls Team Design and which he contrasts with Joint Application Development (JAD) and other group methods. Jones defines five Formats (Business Process Design, Requirements Definition, Application Design, Team Planning, Decision Making) under which almost any development project or part thereof can be placed. He devotes separate chapters to each Format, defining for each Format the life-cycle steps within the Format, the workshop agenda activities that apply to each phase of the life-cycle, and recommended workshop methods (e.g., brainstorming, scoping diagrams, scenario analysis) that can develop the deliverables for the phase. Team Design comprises a generic set of life-cycle Phases (Initiating, Scoping, Visualizing, Usage, Packaging, Validating) that can be mapped to each of the five Formats. For each Phase, Jones then recommends certain workshop methods that can be used regardless of the Format. This allows flexibility in analyzing all the factors facing a Project Manager and Facilitator (organization type, project type, end result, life-cycle phase) and adapting a workshop plan that will apply best. It also allows for bridging of experience with workshop methods across different Formats. Jones also deals in depth with a wide variety of topics related to team-based development, including: · JAD and Participatory Design: A survey of the history of these two group-based methods, and an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses in various environments · Facilitation: The scope of Facilitation; the technical competencies required of a Facilitator in a development environment; in-depth description of facilitation tools (e.g., conflict resolution, problem solving) and workshop methods (e.g., brainstorming, diagramming, Pareto charts), and their applicability · Requirements: Analysis of the major problems faced by organizations in creating and managing requirements, and how Team Design can address those problems · Team Dynamics: The phases of team development; team-building techniques; special issues involving workgroups comprising members with different functional backgrounds · Organizational Culture: The impact of organizational dynamics on a company's receptiveness to structured methods and team-based approaches to development

This book is a comprehensive analysis of the points throughout development life cycles where team collaboration is appropriate for creating deliverables. Formats and methods for conducting team workshops are set out in great detail, based on the organizational environment, project type, end result desired, and particular phase of the life cycle.

Jones proposes a "framework" for development which he calls Team Design and which he contrasts with Joint Application Development (JAD) and other group methods. Jones defines five Formats (Business Process Design, Requirements Definition, Application Design, Team Planning, Decision Making) under which almost any development project or part thereof can be placed. He devotes separate chapters to each Format, defining for each Format the life-cycle steps within the Format, the workshop agenda activities that apply to each phase of the life-cycle, and recommended workshop methods (e.g., brainstorming, scoping diagrams, scenario analysis) that can develop the deliverables for the phase.

Team Design comprises a generic set of life-cycle Phases (Initiating, Scoping, Visualizing, Usage, Packaging, Validating) that can be mapped to each of the five Formats. For each Phase, Jones then recommends certain workshop methods that can be used regardless of the Format. This allows flexibility in analyzing all the factors facing a Project Manager and Facilitator (organization type, project type, end result, life-cycle phase) and adapting a workshop plan that will apply best. It also allows for bridging of experience with workshop methods across different Formats.

Jones also deals in depth with a wide variety of topics related to team-based development, including: (1) JAD and Participatory Design: A survey of the history of these two group-based methods, and an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses in various environments; (2) Facilitation: The scope of Facilitation; the technical competencies required of a Facilitator in a development environment; in-depth description of facilitation tools (e.g., conflict resolution, problem solving) and workshop methods (e.g., brainstorming, diagramming, Pareto charts), and their applicability; (3) Requirements: Analysis of the major problems faced by organizations in creating and managing requirements, and how Team Design can address those problems; (4) Team Dynamics: The phases of team development; team-building techniques; special issues involving workgroups comprising members with different functional backgrounds; and (5) Organizational Culture: The impact of organizational dynamics on a company's receptiveness to structured methods and team-based approaches to development.

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.

This is an excellent book. Mental health professionals, OB-GYNs, women's health nurses and others don't get near enough training on perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. Susan Dowd Stone's book provides the kind of research-based knowledge needed on order for healthcare professionals to provide the proper support to women who may be going through antepartum depression, postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis and related illnesses.

Perinatal and Postpartum Mood Disorders is an excellent, welcomed addition to this important field of maternal mental health. Written by some of the field's most renowned experts, each book chapter lends a unique view, resulting in a well-rounded picture of these disorders and the approaches which heal them.
--Shoshana Bennett, PhD, former president of Postpartum Support International

Postpartum depression continues to splash the headlines with dramatic impact. The upside to this is that it significantly increases public awareness, which is always a good thing. The downside is that media exploitation often leads to the perpetuation of misinterpretations and misunderstandings, which can impede treatment and recovery.

Although the availability of PPD self-help books and moving personal accounts continues to expand, books that address issues crucial to healthcare professionals who treat postpartum women has been lacking. Susan Dowd Stone, MSW, a pioneer for support and legislation within the postpartum depression community for some time, and Alexis Menken, PhD, another great PPD authority, provide a solid foundation for a book that fills this critical gap in the literature. Together, with the most respected and expert voices in the PPD community, they have succeeded in creating a must-have resource for any healthcare practitioner who works with pregnant and postpartum women. Those of us who work in this field are eternally grateful to Susan Dowd Stone's dedication and hard work which has paid off in this indispensable resource!

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.

Some good material but I really found the writing style to be hard to follow and at times confusing. This is a bit of an obscure topic to begin with in my opinion but I think the authors could have done a better job of making the book more readable.

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