Software Books

This book gives you a broad scope of the to be used topics when creating elearning sites. You will get a quick tutorial of the most important Macromedia features to get the process done. In a clear way building up from using templates, attaching stylesheets, showing and hiding layers with Dreamweaver and using Flash for simulation and user-interactivity the book introduces the interaction with databases by using Coldfusion.

I thought Coldfusion was rather difficult to learn, because the tips of the week by Macromedia were a little to quick for me. But Jeffrey Bardzell proved it is easy. In a straight-forward way you are taken by the hand to take all the basic steps for building a data-driven website.

I'm an assoc. prof. of New Testament currently working to produce an interactive web workbook for teaching/learning skills for New Testament interpretation. I want to give students practice developing close reading skills rather than ask them simply to drill content. For a couple of years, I have had a dream for such a site, and I felt sure it was buildable, but didn't know how. I care enough about how the interactions work and the relationship of content to design that I wanted to design the interactions myself if possible. Yet I didn't know anything but a little Dreamweaver and its CourseBuilder extension.

Working my way through a copy of Macromedia MX eLearning is changing all that. Wow! The book teaches how to develop interactions in Dreamweaver and Flash as well as offering several chapters on putting ColdFusion to work in eLearning. Each chapter includes a fine combination of hands-on work and explanation for why we are being asked to do what we're doing, especially at those places where some task is counter-intuitive. The book is also free of mistakes, typos and muddled language, a welcome plus when so many computer books seem to have been rushed to press without having been edited or proofed.

Bardzell's book is giving me two things: (1) hands on work with the software that introduces and reinforces learning without devolving into busywork and (2) a model for developing materials (like the book itself) that teach effectively from a distance. A+

I am a trainer and instructional designer at a university. I thought this book was very useful in helping me to use Flash MX for education. You would likely need some introductory training in Flash and Dreamweaver basics before using this book.

This is an excellent book where you learn how to integrate ColdFusion MX, Dreamweaver MX, and Flash MX by building interactive learning applications. The exercises are explained in great details and contain many tips and techniques especially for Dreamweaver and Flash. The newer aspects of interacting ColdFusion MX with Flash MX are not covered, but for those of us still using ColdFusion 5 there is a good coverage of LoadVars. I recommend this book without any reservation as it is one of the best technical books I have read so far.

Jeffrey Bardzell's book is intelligently written with plenty easy-to-understand examples. He engages, inspires, and motivates learners throughout. His Dante's Inferno project makes learning fun. He breaks subject matter down into comprehendible pieces, using Aristotelian logic in places. This guy knows what he's doing. Of several computer books that I have purchased over the years, this is the first time I have written a review. You can learn eLearning and website design, and this book will teach you how-even if you are a motivated beginner, technical type, or humanities person-this book is suited for most everyone.

Mark Kistler's books are wonderful, entertaining books that canteach anyone (of any age) how to draw! I bought his books for my sons,and I quickly became a devoted fan and an avid drawing maniac myself! The book is packed with pages of fun drawings, as well as 'story starters' in which kids are asked to complete the story. Mark's enthusiasm for drawing and story-telling just bubbles up out of the pages of this book. As a mom, I appreciate his encouragement for kids to watch less tv, say NO to violent video games and drugs, and to expand their brain power by getting involved in art. This book is a 'must have' for all teachers and parents who would like to see their kids motivated to express their creativity and feel good about their drawing ability.

While aimed at kids, this is a great place to start at any age. If you have been looking at other drawing books, and the books you have seen before only make it harder, your search is over. Mark makes it easy for anyone at any age to get basic drawing skills, the building blocks you need to get started. He teaches the skills that other books make seem complex, without the stress or making it go over your head. His way of teaching is simply the easiest method a person can have to start drawing. And if the books are good, his old show on PBS and his videos are even better. Mark makes drawing so fun kids beg to use the book again and again. He does not start by intimidating you with the completed project, in fact you don't always know what you are drawing until you are done. He takes you one line, circle, or square at a time and before you know it you have a fun drawing. I also reccommend you try the books from Ed Emberly, or check my lists on Amazon for kids that want to learn to draw, or be a cartoonist or animator.

If you think you stink at drawing, think again! Mark Kistler shows you how, step by step, to draw pictures that really look like something and tell a story besides!

I bought this book to relearn how to draw properly. While the book is directed at a young audience, adults-at-heart like me will benefit from the drawing principles such as foreshortening, placement, size, overlapping, shading and shadowing, contour and horizon (plus 1 and 2 point perspectives). My disappointments were that a few later lessons repeat previous lessons and that it uses blank pages after each lesson for you to practice on. I suggest you use a separate sheet of paper to do this so you can pass this book to your kids and their kids and so on and so forth. Despite these, I still rate it 5 stars.

I can now draw simple everyday objects both as cartoons and as realistically as I can. They're not professional quality yet, the book recommends daily practice until they are and that's exactly what I'm doing.

This isn't the only book you should buy though if you want to draw artistically. In my case, I'd like to draw comics-style characters and objects so I can move on to animating them later. I got Tom Alvarez's "How to Create Action, Fantasy and Adventure Comics" (separately reviewed) which is also an excellent how-to book.

Mark Kistler's books are EXCELLENT for anyone who want to learn to draw. The layout of the book is fun easy to follow. Although it is geared toward children it is appropriate for a beginner adult. It starts with simple concepts and gradually builds on what you've already learned. Anyone at any age will be impressed by what you will be drawing in a short amount of time. I bought this book for my children and was so impressed , I started drawing myself. My children love this book and so do I.

If you've ever seen a large sponge that someone has sucked all the water from and seen how small it can get and still be a sponge, then you understand the premise of what is here. All the other NT Workstation books have had the fluff sucked from them to make this book - what is left has no wasted space/thoughts/text.

All needed I to become MCP and start getting benefits. Exam now questions 15 with adaptive format. Know the material here well and you pass first time out.

I spent a lot of looking over the coverage of key topics in half-a-dozen Workstation books. This one covered them in as much or more detail than any other. The small size comes from the fact that the non-critical nonsense has been removed, which saves me from having to jump over a dozen pages here and there.

I found the book to be easy to read, easy to understand, and all that it was advertised to be, and then some.

After years of struggle, NT Workstation won the client war in my workplace and it was decided that 1000 users had to be changed over from every other thinkable operating system to NTW.

I knew some about the OS, but not much. I also knew that someone would have to become an MCP in order to convince corporate that IT knew what is was doing and to leave us alone. In order to accomplish those goals, I needed a quick solution, and the Fast Track seemed like it.

To make a long story short, I learned more about the OS from this book that I ever imagined, and passed the new adaptive exam (much less questions) with flying colors.

Not only is this an excellent book for certification study, but it is one of the best technical books I've ever read on NT Workstation. I typically buy three or four books on a topic when studying for an exam to avoid wasting time if I get a junk one. In this case, I read only the one and intend to buy only one now for any study topic the fast track is available for.

I always start with reading a MCSE for dummies when I am preparing for an exam. This one is the best so far and after taking the exam I can say that this book is all you need.
I used other materials as well because there were some objectives that I did not have experience with.
I scored 790 and that was more than I expected.

I found this book full of information without drowning it's readers in useless jargon. Some of the content was covered only briefly, but with some hands on learning and this book, passing the test was a breaze!

As a Microsoft Instructor, I recommend this book to all of my students. It cuts through the fluff and crud that Microsoft usually tacks on to the courses and gets to the meat and potatoes of what Active Directory is all about. Several students have used this besides my class and have blown the test away. Check out the author's exam tips to save yourself some headaches.

This book does a fantastic job preparing you for the exam 70-217. I am currently an NT 4.0 MCSE aspiring to be a Windows 2000 MCSE and wouldn't of been able to pass this exam with out this book. The author did an wonderful job helping me understand the complex features of Active Directory like group policies and remote install services. Which by the way are hit hard on the exam. I recommend this book to everyone looking to get certified in Windows 2000.

I passed 70-217 today using this book. I scored an 800 and something. This book did a great job of covering the material that MS tests about.

My review may be biased, because I really enjoyed this book.
This book is well written and instead of directly heading to the technical aspects of Sharepoint, it goes and starts with the problems that are most likely to kill a Sharepoint project: change resistance, politics and conflict management.
However it doesn't stop there. The book digs deep into every aspect of a SharePoint project lifecycle from envisioning to deployment. This book is a must read for software architects.
PROS:
1) Full of effective recommendations on how to get the most of SharePoint.
2) Solid advice on how to manage SharePoint projects.
CON:
1)It may be overwhelming to new SharePoint players. If you are new to SharePoint consider reading the chapters relevant in each phase of the project.
2) If you are looking for technical depth and how-to practices, you won't find them here.

My own Sharepoint 2007 book came out recently and so I have been constantly checking the Amazon US "hit parade" to see how it's been doing.

Well it's doing OK, but the book which at the moment seems to be selling in vast quantities is this MOSS 2007 Best Practices book.

Now I'll admit that before I got a copy for myself I was hard put to understand why. After all this was a book by the two people (Bill English and Ben Curry) who had (organised or) written the two existing Sharepoint Administrator Books from Microsoft Press - the massive (and, through the many authors, slightly unbalanced) Administrator's Companion and the small, but full of quality information "Administrator's Pocket Consultant - so what else could there be in this one ?

Actually there's a lot because this is probably a completely different book to any of the - by now almost 100 - SharePoint 2007 books that have gone before.

It's probably the first one that you can **and should** read without having a computer handy.

The book doesn't concentrate on teaching you how to do things - which is naturally what most of the other books do - but instead concentrates on making you THINK. Think, that is, about your options BEFORE you do things.

The other thing I've noticed is that it's the kind of book where you can dive into a topic that's maybe only a part of a section of a chapter and read just that and you will have learned something useful.

My favorite example of that is the few pages in the Document Management chapter that discuss whether or not you should use SharePoint (document libraries) as a replace for a File Server system. First there's the single line with the answer (No) but that's followed by some indication of what could be moved and what not and why. These are inter-spaced with several in-boxes containing examples from the real-world - one of which to my delight (and this IS a Microsoft Press book) actually suggested that in certain circumstances you should keep your non-Microsoft application and NOT move to SharePoint 2007!

In fact the only thing I found to object to in that section of the text was the fact that whereas "SharePoint Server" had been given its "2007" to complete the product name (unnecessary - there isn't any other "SharePoint Server"), Windows SharePoint Services had been left without it's (essential) "3.0". This comment, however, is rather like the car tests of old where the car was highly praised in all essential details but for balance it was mentioned that the ash tray was badly located!

The only other aspect I have a problem with is that it is 800 pages thick. As it's the kind of book that in my opinion you should carry around with you and just read bits of in odd moments, it's a pity that it's not thinner and lighter and is instead the size and weight of book that is more suited to being permanently located on the desk next to the computer.

Microsoft Press France actually did make two volumes out of the 1000 page Administrator's Companion when they created the French language translation of that, so it's possible and it's a pity to my mind that Microsoft Press US didn't make two volumes out of this. It would need those two 400 page volumes because there is good stuff throughout, but to my mind this book cries out to be as easy to carry around as the Pocket Consultant is and it isn't.

Maybe they are planning a Kindle version. That would at least help US readers take this "book" with them everywhere.

This is a Must-read for anyone in a SharePoint role. It is written for both technical personnel and business value reviews. Great strategic advice, insightful use of experience. Way to go, Microsoft Press! If this series continues as well written as this book, it should be awesome.

When deploying SharePoint, it is critical to plan for not only what you need now, but for how it will grow and scale down the road, especially when Document Management is involved. If you don't plan adequately for searchability, scalability, or disaster recovery, you can easily run into problems.

One criticism I have had of many SharePoint books is that they are written from a technical perspective and explain how to install and configure SharePoint, but they gloss over the critical planning stages or the best practices for scalability.

As the name of this book indicates, this is a very thorough guide covering the best practices for planning, deploying, optimizing, and organizing SharePoint. This book is not necessarily intended to give you step-by-step instructions for installing SharePoint, but rather cover the full lifecycle of a SharePoint deployment and give you best practice recommendations. The layout and organization of the book is very logical, making it easy to quickly find what you are looking for. It covers both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and MOSS 2007. It is written to be accessible by anyone on a team evaluating or implementing SharePoint, or anyone who just wants to learn more about it.

The book is broken into the following sections:

Introduction--includes an overview of the various SharePoint Technologies, how to determine which you need, and how SharePoint will help your business.

Part I--Planning--This is not just about planning for the IT infrastructure, but more about planning for the impact that SharePoint will have on your organization, such as dealing with push-back from users after moving away from shared folders to SharePoint document libraries and breaking down departmental "information kingdoms."

Part II--Building--This section gets into best practices for building your environment, including content management strategies, the role of custom development, and dev and test environments, including replication of content between environments.

Part III--Deploying--This section has a great discussion about organizing your content and search/crawling strategy to optimize searchability for your content, security of content, business intelligence, and intranet/extranet/internet deployment scenarios.

Part IV--Operating--This section has great tips on availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and performance monitoring.

What I appreciated most about this book is it is very readable and does not include a lot of "fluff," just straightforward best practices. For example, in Chapter 8, the section on should SharePoint replace file servers is very straightforward about the limitation of SharePoint and when file servers should still be used.

If you are someone new to SharePoint or a System Administrator charged with deploying SharePoint, this book may leave you wanting more--it is not designed to be a how-to book; however, it does include many good recommendations for additional resources.

This is a must-have book for any serious SharePoint administrators. The topics are well laid out and the authors provide excellent explanations. Examples and authors insight into various topics are very valuable. I definitely recommend this book for any SharePoint Administrator during the early phases of any SharePoint implementation. The Best Practices suggested by the authors would definitely help you to deploy a successful SharePoint solution.

The Companion CD contains sample project plan, project charter, DDoc etc that are very useful to SharePoint Administrators.

Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET):
"This book is the authoritative reference to the .NET Framework libraries: Base Class Library (BCL) and Extended Numerics Library. Each type has its own chapter with the following features;

- Header - namespace name, type name, library name.
- Type summary - C# declaration syntax for all members.
- Type description - detailed usage description.
- Annotations - annotations by key Microsoft design team members including Anders Hejlsberg.
- Example - C# source code and program output."

Out of all of the technical books I own, this book is by far one of the best. It covers most of the areas .NET developers will encounter during development. It clearly tells you the information in a easy to understand focused manner.

The other reviewers didn't left too much to say. So I'll remember a credit card TV ad:
SLAR volume 1: $42.89
Shipping & Handling: $12.98
Having BCL authors commenting on types, design decisions, dos and don'ts: priceless.
You can find references about the BCL on innumerous places. For an insiders perspective, SLAR.

Looking for a handy reference for the .NET Framework classes?

If you are looking for a handy reference style book for the .NET Framework BCL (Base Class Library) then look no further. This book is packed to the brim with information, code samples and other goodies. Of coarse you can find this sort of information on MSDN, but wouldn't it be nice to have a well laid out hard-copy on your desk?

This book comes with a couple of really handy tools. First, you get a pretty handy .NET Framework map, which is a pretty large poster that maps out the BCL nicely. Also, you get a really nice CD which includes a .pdf file with almost 4000 pages (it's like a super-detailed version of the book). That's not it - the CD also has a HUGE library of code samples. The CD alone is worth the price in my opinion.

I am very happy with this purchase, I only wish I would have bought it sooner. I am very much looking forward to the next volume!

Having been an avid reader of Brad Abrams blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/brada) for a year and a half, I was eagerly anticipating this book from the moment it was announced; it didn't disappoint. The SLAR provides an extensive description and example of each type, as well as comments from the likes of Anders Hejlsberg, Kit George, Jeffrey Richter and Brad Abrams himself. These comments provide hints and clues into the inner workings of the Base Class Library (BCL) types and why Microsoft chose to implement types in certain ways. This book was an interesting read and like Sean below, I am also left wanting more. However, with Volume 2 on the horizon, I enthusiastically wait...

I bought this book for a class but will definitely keep it afterwards. A lot of well organized information on computer security, from policy to implementation.

This book wasn't required, but suggested for one of my classes. I am so glad that I bought it. I'll be referencing it for years. So much info in it. Why is it so cheap?

Network Security: The Complete Reference is simply an awesome security book.

It has just about everything you need to know when it comes to infosec.

A true bible for network security. Also covered are items on risk management, network security policies etc. The book includes simple to advanced topics on network security

I'm working in Information Security, and I was looking for a good security book, fortunately my decision was the best. This book is very complete and not only explain the concepts of network security but Information Security in the general context. The topics are technical as well as administrative. Explain how the security should be implemented and assessed or audited. I really improved my knowledge and my productivity in my job.

As all colleges do, we offer adult evening classes on programs which our advisory board recommends. This semester, we offered our first evening SolidWorks CSWA Certification program. To my surprise, the class was filled in four days with 20 students, some from industry, and some from our engineering program.

I use the SolidWorks CSWA Certification Guide in class. The book is a comprehensive review and practice package for the certification. Every chapter focuses your study and tests your knowledge of the subject through specially designed assessment exercises. What is especially great about this book is that it includes self study sections with the initial and final models.

For anybody starting to prepare for the CSWA exam, this is the book you should be looking at.

Very imformative I learnt something the first time I opened the book, recommend to all.

I've been using Engineering Design with SolidWorks by Planchard and Planchard in my classroom for the past few years. In my opinion, this is one of the finest SolidWorks books on the market today. As an instructor, I can appreciate when an author/s writes a brilliant user friendly book with clear step by step procedures and illustrations to educate the student. This makes my life in the classroom a lot easier....

This fall, my students requested to take the CSWA Certification exam. I had my students purchase this book which we used for the exam preparation. The students enjoyed the book immensely. The book is focused on the exam, by key categories with many examples and exercises. I would not recommend this book for anyone who does not have at least six to eight months of SolidWorks knowledge. The CSWA exam is not an easy exam, but like any industry certification, it provides a tangible measurement to the skill sets of the student in 3D CAD. Well done.

I enjoy the modeling techniques presented in the book which I did not encounter in my Solidworks training; it is always a good practice to learn for any software from different prospective. So this book does not only prepare you to the exam it also teaches you the most effective and smartest modeling techniques.

I pass the exam with 80% mark, but be careful guys, the parts in the exam was NOT easy.

This is a great book for SolidWorks users. I learned many new techniques going though the exersizes. In spite of four years of industrial exprience using SolidWorks, I would have failed the CSWA exam without this book, becasue many of the modleing methods on the test are not used in my industry.

Best off shore book out there... great info...lays it out pretty straight. Easy to understand and follow.

This volume is well-written, lucid and easy to follow. The authors have done an excellent job in providing an explanatory framework for offshoring, as well as giving a realistic look at potential costs and benefits. Their list of suggestions and guidelines is comprehensive. The book avoids the trap of becoming overly technical and steers clear of being specific to any particular country or industry. I was pleasantly surprised to find chapters on such important topics as country-specific legal pitfalls, privacy rights issues, and how to sell the idea of offshoring inside a company resistant to the idea. The authors livened up their material with numerous case studies to illustrate key points. The level of detail they provided on how to write a solid Service Level Agreement (SLA) was also impressive.

Overall this was an excellent volume, and the only two objections that I have are both minor. First, the book could benefit from a small amount of updating; some of the data, especially in Part I of book, dates from 2001-2003. In any other discipline, that would still be considered fairly recent. However in technology, that verges on being stale. In addition, that was the period of the global downturn in IT. The authors' data would be obviously impacted by that global economic event. To be clear: I do not believe that any of the authors' points would be reversed by updating the data. On the contrary, I expect that current data would only strengthen their points, as the trends they identified have only accelerated since the book's first publication. Second, as noted earlier the authors provided several cases of companies who tried offshoring and either failed, or suffered setbacks. Given the fact that offshoring is not the cure-all for every company, it would have also been useful to see a couple of case studies of companies who investigated the offshoring option but decided against it. It is just as important to understand why a company declines to offshore, as it is to understand why they would undertake to do so.

This is a book that I wish I had read before working on several offshoring/outsourcing projects for former employers. It is highly recommended for anyone who is contemplating the offshore option, or who has recently been put in charge of making such an option successful.

This is a rather comprehensive look of why software
development gets offshored and of how to do it right
should you decide to try it yourself. The authors are
an academic and a consultant, making the book an
appealing blend of evidence-based theory and practical
advice. The focus is primarily on software
development, with some attention paid to such
IT-enabled services as call centers.

The two most appealing things about the book are its
maintenance of a practical tone and its
comprehensiveness in identifying the many things you
need to get right to get offshoring to work right. For
example, international projects tend to get into
serious difficulty if the customer is unwilling or
unable to provide sufficiently detailed specifications
to bring task ambiguity down to the level that can
survive the communications problems caused by distance
and cultural differences.

The authors put a lot of effort into explaining why
some countries have been successful at growing an
offshoring business and others not. This insight is
valuable for companies into offshoring for the long
haul, as you need to understand how wage rates and
technology depth wax and wane over time.

The book also has a number of chapters written by
specialists in such important ancillary areas as
international contacts and managing cultural
differences. All in all, a very useful book.

This book does an excellent job of linking offshoring to a company's business strategy. Many companies are pursuing offshoring to take advantage of lower wages in other countries. Chapter 5 shows how cost reduction can be strategic, and the other potential non-cost-based advantages of offshoring. Its treatment is also balanced, showing the downsides, costs, and risks of offshoring as well as the benefits. And it talks about choices companies have in implementing an offshore strategy.

I am Executive Director of a research center on process management, and we have done research in this area. I know and respect Erran Carmel, the author, and Peter Schumacher, who co-authored Chapter 5. Peter's work is grounded in consulting that he has done at the Value Leadership Group, which advises companies on how to think beyond cost cutting and view offshore as an opportunity to build unique competitive advantage.

"All things being equal, any manager would prefer to manage a co-located team rather than a distributed team," how true. Authors Erran Carmel and Paul Tija believe that IT managers need to feel as comfortable with managing distributed teams as they are with co-located teams. They intend their book, Offshoring Information Technology, to act as a primer for IT professionals, students and teachers in business and technology programs as well as policy makers and analysts in and around governments. That is a lot of end parties to satisfy, so does this book hit the mark.

Erran Carmel had previously authored, "Global Software Development Teams", in 1999, and has deeply focused on the topic of developing software with global teams for years. It is obvious that a researcher was one of the co-authors, as very accurate listing of references are made, more than you usually see in many of these books on offshoring. These references provide another list of papers and publications that the reader can use for further research. The book makes excellent use of cross-referencing between topics, which also adds to its usage as a good reference tool.

Right off I like the preface in which the authors define the terms offshoring and outsourcing. Since I agree there are many strange definitions leading everyone to think outsourcing means offshoring, this needed to be included. The offshore stage model, previously defined by one of the authors in a research paper, puts the offshoring numbers in to perspective by dividing it in to stages and the number of Fortune 1000 companies currently using the offshoring model. These numbers may be surprising to some, as the actual usage is much smaller than is played up in the media.

The book is full of case studies, most of them fairly interesting. The case study in chapter 9 is meant to show the difference between working in a low-content country versus a high-context country like India. I, along with I believe many practitioners, will look on this case study and say that Christina (not her real name) was not a good manager, no matter where she was working, if they thought dumping a bunch of new work on a team was not going to impact the schedule. Low-content or high-content country aside, the project manager made too many assumptions and may not be the experienced project manager that she thought she was. I think others will see the same when they read it. Another real life case study gives an example of one company trying to do a comparison between countries; what do we learn from it, price wins out over quality in the end, which in reality is often the case.

The emphasis on knowledge transfer is exceptional. This area is often glossed over in many offshoring books. Chapter 7 which is dedicated to managing the offshore transition defines different ways of undertaking knowledge transfer. One of the ways that they describe is to have the developers work in different positions, i.e. put them in to the user's position, so they understand why the user works the way they do. They state that this is new. I started out in banking twenty years ago and this is how I started out, working the user positions of the applications which I was then to develop and maintain, so I do not think this concept is new. But perhaps the authors mean this is new for offshore outsourcing. In all though this section on knowledge transfer is valuable and looks at all of the different types of transfer: skills, process, domain and work and cultural norms. Good emphasis on the fact that the easiest one to achieve is skills transfer, but the other ones are more difficult to achieve. For example it is more difficult to have someone work on dispute resolutions app for credit card processing, when they do not understand how credit card processing works.

Chapter 8 on overcoming distance and time emphasizes and outlines virtual team management. Much of the information presented is included in many books on virtual team management, but as this book is a primer for IT managers, it has a place in this book. Readers will find the suggestions on iteration development; formalizing the iterations and frequency of iterations particularly helpful in a real situation. I whole heartedly agree that this is what builds trust. If you have frequent deliverables, and the remote team meets those frequent deliverables, i.e. they do what they say they are going to do, trust is built. The authors also define the range of deliverables and that it can be anything: plans, outlines, prototypes, simulations, design reviews, test results, software code reviews, module integration and documents. Again I wholeheartedly agree. This will be an area that many IT managers may have to get used to because at first to some it seems like "make work", when in fact all of what is delivered from the offshore is and should be useful for fulfilling the project.

There are a few situations where puzzling statements are used such as the quote on pg. 28, just before a section on IT-enabled services. The quote refers to E-loan and its well-documented offering to its clients of a couple of years ago. At the time E-loan offered the users of their loan service to Press 1 if they wanted their loan processed in 1 day in an Indian center, or to press 2 if they wanted their loan processed in the US which included the statement that the processing may then take longer. In March of 2004, this was written up by many Indian firms as admittance by a US company that Indians are faster. It seems strange that the authors use this statement with no no explanation; for example was it really an admittance that Indians are faster or did it really mean E-loan had 4 times as many processors in India versus the number in the US, thus accounting for how loans could be processed faster there. Or were they working round the clock in India versus only one shift in the US, another reason for the difference. In other areas the authors go to great lengths to explain issues which are reported in the press, such as how offshore labor rates are reported in detail and what they really mean versus the actual total cost of ownership.

The book contains an excellent discussion on the different types of risk, very detailed, to a level not usually defined. Only one area, contractual risk, seemed to be lacking. The authors state that a buyer can mitigate contractual risk by signing a contract with a US company, if you are a US buyer, or with a UK company if you are a UK buyer, i.e. with a company which is also domiciled in your location versus in the offshore location only. The authors also refer to the chapter on Legal issues of offshoring where contractual risk will be further defined. In that chapter, however, only mention to reduce contractual risk is to work with providers who can provide a combination of onshore/offshore resources, thus enabling a buyer to access the provider's onshore resources if necessary. They seem to fail to mention one of the bigger issues; if the contract does go awry, even if you are dealing with the big Indian players, most of the assets that of that vendor are located in the offshore location. If any case, you will have to bring suit against that vendor in their home country. Large buyers already seem to be aware of this based on both outsourcing and vertical conferences I have attended over the last couple of years.

There were two areas where I thought more emphasis could have been made, if this is a book is really meant to assist IT professionals. One of these areas is helping the IT manager assess their own offshore readiness; how do they feel about the process, are they ready to change how they work, are they ready to manage by not walking around? The second area of missed opportunity is assisting IT professionals in defining what could be a new role for them in the global environment, for example by working in and/or managing the offshore office which is responsible for managing the onshore and offshore outsourcing for a client.

Offshoring Information Technology is an informative and educational book for IT managers looking to define their place in the offshoring world. The details provided on the offshoring process and through the case studies will make it easy for an IT professional to determine where they may need to gain additional knowledge to move their career forward. The book will be most useful and most familiar to those IT professionals currently working in or with large scale enterprises as most case studies and examples such as in total cost of ownership and the governance areas, use examples from large enterprises. This book is highly recommended for IT professionals who are looking at career development as well as those persons who are in a position to help their countries promote their outsourcing capabilities.

This book is a true student service for online learning and is a great step toward online student retention! It covers everything the online student would need to know in order to succeed in a self-paced, self-motivated, and technology dependant environment!!

I compared Online Student Skills and Strategies Handbook (Pearson Longman 2006) to E-Learning Companion A Student's Guide to Online Success (Houghton Mifflin 2005) in order to select a resourse to support distance learning. I found Online Student Skills and Strateiges Handbook much more useful, learner oriented and readily accessible. It includes large, clear screen captures to accompany step by step directions. It handles practical topics like using Rich Text Format (RTF), practicing netiquette, storing lessons in a binder, and submitting assignments. It also includes cross references to other relevant chapters in the handbook, and it includes other Internet resources for each chapter. In comparison, E-Learning seems too textbookish. While E-Learning has a useful glossary and index, Online Student Skills and Strategies has a glossary, index and Webliography.

This is a valuable resource for students interested in a successful on-line learning experience. The straightforward and practical examples should help guide everyone from novice to experienced.

I was very impressed with the format, content, attention to detail, step-by-step approach to help users work through technology, and the success-oriented focus of the text. The first chapter utilized an innovative and unique assessment to help users identify what they already know and what they will need to focus on to learn. The text is a well-designed and non-threatening resource for any online user.

I think this text is a practical and useful guide for both novice and experienced online students. The information is very well organized throughout with a couple great appendices containing websites and computer skill tips. The helpful screenshots and lay flat binding are a plus for use as you are working on the computer.