Purchasing Books

This is the 7th book in the Illustrated Buyer's Guide series I have purchased. While this book has a great deal of history and plenty of personal anecdotes by the author, it is lacking in technical detail and buying suggestions. Other buyer's guides have much more information about details like powertrains, paint codes, etc. They also cover issues which buyers should be aware of, including likely rust spots, how to spot rare option combinations which have been faked and so forth. The technical details of the various model years of trucks in this book is spotty at best. Admittedly, this book is trying to cover almost 100 years worth of vehicles and there's only so much room to fit everything in. Nevertheless, this is more of an "Illustrated History" than an "Illustrated Buyer's Guide". And as a history book, with interesting information and a number of great pictures, this book will stay on my shelves. But I will continue to look for a better buyer's guide.

For Cessna lovers this is a fun one mans experience and love of flying Cessnas including military versions. Great Reading, though not the best Buyers Guide

Despite the title, the book actually does not cover "all" Packard products. In fact, it's very weak on commercial and professional vehicles, with very few photographs or useful information. The author has done a good job on the common models and the desirable models (like convertibles), but glosses over much of the "custom", commercial, and professional cars manufactured by Packard. If you are seriously looking to buy a Packard, consider this as a starting point, but do not rely upon it for prices, availability, or attempt to use it as an authoritative reference. You'll find that, in the marketplace, Packard automobiles are hard to locate in the concours condition priced in the book, cost more, and more common models range widely from descriptions due to customization by owners over the last 40-70 years.

Good for investors who wanted to purchase or sale a business

While there is some valuable information in this slim book, for a few dollars more, one can purchase Larry Fine's The Piano Book, which has far more detailed in information.

Basic in both supply chain concepts and BPM. You can tell the book was written by several authors as same materials were presented over again in other chapters. One got the feeling they were selling a BPM product. There focus was on the computer system rather then the human elements of business processes.

None of the authors touched on Business Process Mapping as a tool for documenting how things are done from a human prespective.

Easy to read, shamefully out of date in terms of technology, great overview of basics...best suitable for operations/supply chain novices. Totally American focused and centred.

Really good and usefull. Try it and see Be sure. I am not liar.

This is an excellent window to be aware of the importance of integrating purchasing strategies with various business tools such as TQM, JIT, MRP.The author critically analyses trends of management focus and gives suggestions to purchasing personnel to re-allign and improve their performance measures of cost, quality and delivery. As a practising purchase manager, I have been greatly benefited in provoking the thought process of my department personnel to constantly innovate and improve their effectiveness. I have recomended a copy of this book to all libraries of our 17 group companies. I would be delighted if the author and the publishers come out with material on using "change management" by purchase professionals to use tools of ERP and e-commerce and "adjust their sails" to ride the new cutting edge technologies.

...and I get to be the first to review "Secret Guide"!

Russ Walter's "Secret Guide to Computers" covers several computer-related topics including hardware, software, the Internet, programming, the people who are likely to use computers, the history of computing and more. Since 1972, "Secret Guide" has undergone several revisions. The most recent was the 30th edition and was released earlier this month (September 2007).

The current "Secret Guide" as well as earlier editions include informative buyers guides to contemporary systems, hardware components and recently-released software as well as older programs that might be available from online retailers, but not on the store shelves anymore.

"Secret Guide" also has sections on how to work with computer operating systems, mostly recent versions of MS Windows, but also covers MS-DOS, and Mac OS X. These combined with chapters on how to get by when using MS Office, Internet Explorer, Outlook and how software, hardware and users work together in easy-to-understand language make for a good introduction for people who are new to these subjects.

The author, Russ Walter, comes from a technical background, especially computer programming. In the early days of micro-computers (before PC's), people who used computers were expected to understand something about how files and data within were managed and accessed, even if they didn't work in a data-processing department. The 29th Edition of "Secret Guide" (2004) is 607 pages long and the sections on programming take up 209 of those pages. If you're interested in programming, the chapters on languages are a good introduction to why programming languages as well as computers in general work the way they do.

The downside to the above is that so much of the sections about programming are rather dated as of the 29th edition. Of the 209 pages on programming, 97 of those pages are a tutorial about a language called "QBasic" which came as a free feature with MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, but has since been available only as an obscure download. The tutorial is extensive and comprehensive, but its usefulness is debatable as many of the principles might not apply when learning programming languages that are taught and used in 2007 (such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and newer versions of Visual Basic).

Also, the tutorial on Java seems to require Visual J++, which was Microsoft's implementation of Java and was sold with Microsoft Visual Studio 6. Visual J++ is no longer available for sale, and the Sun Java Development Kit has been available for free download since 1995. The section on C++ requires MS Visual C++. Earlier editions of "Secret Guide" covered the C language, but also required Microsoft C compilers and IDE's (Integrated Development Environments - user interface programs). In future editions, I'd be interested in similar chapters covering languages such as Perl, PHP and other languages that don't need Microsoft interpreters, libraries, compilers or environments.

Walter offers chapters with articles about key persons in the history of computing such as Charles Babbage, Grace Hopper, on down to Gary Kildall, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I'd like to see more about folks like Richard M. Stallman, Larry Wall, and of course, Linus Torvalds.

"The Secret Guide to Computers" is a good book to buy if it's a first or second book about computers. ...but not the last one.