Professional Books

If you want to start programming network and distributed systems in Pocket PC platform this is the book for you.

Juan Carlos Olivares Rojas
http://mail.cenidet.edu.mx/~jcolivares04c/

The content is amazing covering a lot of issues on Pocket PC programming. Very detailed and easy to understand. A lot of code samples making life so much easier! A must for every Pocket PC developer.

Any developer can benefit from this useful book. Combining the best aspects of a users' guide and a reference manual, the book has any information a Pocket PC programmer would need, in a format that's easy to use and readable. The index, FAQs and code samples make it easy to find just the information you're looking for, with descriptions providing more context and background. And I particularly enjoyed the funny and appropriate quotes from movies or TV programs at the beginning of each section.

There is somewhat of a dearth of books on Pocket PC development in general, and so that there is a book of this quality devoted to Pcoket PC Networking is pretty amazing. And "Networking" really means more than just what most folks might consider Networking, like Desktop Synchronization, Infared and a chapter on Pocket PC Phone issues.

Before I picked up a copy of Steve's book, I had no idea that there was so much to network programming on the PocketPC. Now, I wouldn't want to do that programming without this book. Thanks, Steve!

This book is more than worth its money in culinary gold. I recently graduated from culinary school and have started a catering business with my husband. I've read a number of books on how to start a catering business and have found this to be the best one yet. Lots of information and very good detail. Every caterer needs to have this copy in their reference library.

A must have book for a new Caterer starting their own business.

"THE PROFESSIONAL CATERER'S HANDBOOK: HOW TO OPEN AND OPERATE A FINANCIALLY SUCCESSFUL CATERING BUSINESS" by Lora Arduser and Douglas Robert Brown.

This book is an indispensable addition to any would be caterer's library. If you have thought about turning your catering skills into a full time business this book will open your eyes to all that is involved in starting and operating your own catering business.

Any and every aspect of operating your own successful catering business is included in this fabulous book. The authors start by talking about the skills needed to open and operate your own catering business, the give you a step by step planning guide to developing your business goals and plan.

Each chapter of this text skillfully builds on the last one to provide you with a comprehensive handbook to answer all your questions. Should you own or lease, what laws should you be aware of, how to market your company, how to set up the event, staffing, which equipment to purchase, and should you start as a home based catering company? These are only a few of the thousands of answers you will get from reading this handbook.

From the very first page of the book the author's are getting you excited about opening your own catering business. The tone of the book is uplifting and positive and will make you feel like you could do this!

The book also comes with a companion CD-ROM that will provide additional resource material including tons of business forms to get you started. This book is great for anyone in the catering business, weather a seasoned business owner or just in the contemplation stages of owning their own business; this book will be an invaluable source of information.

If you want to enter the catering business, there are plenty of lighter guides on the topic on the market - but if you're really serious about professionally entering the business, you can't be without THE PROFESSIONAL CATERER'S HANDBOOK: HOW TO OPEN AND OPERATE A FINANCIALLY SUCCESSFUL CATERING BUSINESS. A cd-rom supplements the weighty exploration which is actually a detailed manual of step-by-step instruction on all the basics. From bookkeeping and handling profits and loss to considering the pros and cons of professional equipment, there's no better guide on the market. College-level culinary schools in particular must have this reference.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

The Professional Caterer's Handbook: How To Open And Operate A Financially Successful Catering Business (With CD-Rom), expertly co-authored by Lora Arduser and Douglas Robert Brown, is an informative introduction and comprehensive guide to properly establishing and managing a catering business. Comprehensively mapping out an easy-to-follow, "user-friendly" compendium of strategies and tactics for establishing a company name and reputation, The Professional Caterer's Handbook presents logical and effective advise vitally important for all aspiring catering entrepreneurs. The Professional Caterer's Handbook is very strongly recommended as instructional reading for all small catering business developers, those hoping to create a professional catering business, and for those seeking to expand their catering business.

It was fast
It was what I ordered
Im happy, they're happy
Win Win!

I used this book in my professional practice class and a co-worker of mine borrowed it to study for the NCIDQ - she said many of the ethical and business related questions that appeared on the test were covered in this book. It is really well written and easy to follow. The CD has good resources, like mock invoices and POs that you can open and edit.

thick book,man. I have to carry it to school for my class.
it has all need about Inerior Design profession

The reviewer prior to myself I feel summed it up best when describing this book. The author has written the book as if she's always been your trusted friend. She writes in a way as if she is actually talking to you.

Other books I've read often come across a bit too technical and slightly over my head. This one is more down-to-earth, packed with good advice, and one can sense her sincere concern for the reader to understand.

I really love the entire book, especially the chapter dealing with ethics. Since there are many "seasoned" designers who seem to lack ethical conduct, this book is great for beginners and veterans alike.

I have practiced interior design for over 20 years and still found this book to be invaluable. The information about legal ramifications and insurance coverage was enlightening but also sobering. It's a must read for any design firm principal or freelance designer.

When I got a copy of this book and realized what was on my hands I hurried up to ask for a copy to our University Library. Unfortunately, it seemed that the book has been discontinued from Addison Wesley's catalog. 'It must be a joke...' I thought. Well, I'm not pretty sure about that, but if it's true 0 stars for AW editors!

I really think that this should have be a bestseller, if only the 've made a better promotional campaign. I found the book thanks to a cross reference in 'Wi-Foo', a masterpiece of Wi-Fi security. I had never heard of Puzmanova's book before.

It's a superb guide about networking interconnections, at the same level of Radia Perlman's Interconnections book. But with some useful enhancements, including keywords and concepts highlights, and a very organized content presentation. It's extremely easy to find what you're looking for in a moment.

I agree with the other reviews about the contents so I won't add anything here. No matter if you only manage to find a used copy, it worths your money and effort. Get it!!

Excellent. Well written, well structured and comprehensive. Breadth of coverage necessarily means less depth on any given subject, but good references allow in-depth follow up. All in all, easy to read and very insightful.

I am a Beng Electronic engineer Final Year student doing my final year project on routing efficiencies, investigating packet arrival times using different routing protocols. I have so far found this book extremely beneficial, which explains a lot of the terminology and techniques in the routing world in great detail. For me its not a book to read from back to back, but one that I found very handy to have near by when working along with my project.

I bought this book on Brian Dennis' recommendation, and I've been very happy with my purchase. The book goes into a tremendous amount of detail on various bridging techniques and routing protocols, but it's quite easy to read and very enjoyable. Excellent work.

Chris Bryant
CCIE #12933

Puzmanova says the main aim in her book is to show what's behind "the evolution in network interconnection, and give some clue as to where industry developments and standardization efforts are headed: to gain performance by avoiding unnecessary processing in the internetworking device itself, whether router or switch."

Part I is on the principles of network interconnection. This is an overview of the layering principles in building and operating networks. Puzmanova's enthusiasm comes out here as she talks about how she became fascinated in the relaying (routing) principles observed in each layer. She peeled the OSI onion from the outside in, looking at the network from the top layers down. The relaying principles at each layer cover pretty much all the widespread LAN (802.3, Token Ring, FDDI) and WAN (X.25, ISDN, Frame Relay, ATM and SONET) technologies. Then she covers network management and remote monitoring, as well as the principles of network interconnection. At this section she addresses a key question: What is the difference between a router and a switch? After all, switches route, and routers switch. The difference is in the architecture. A switch architecture provides additional forwarding capacity as ports are added. A router typically has a single forwarding engine and additional ports still share the capacity of this single engine. Interestingly, this is somewhat analogous to the difference between shared and switched media, seen in the evolution from hubs to switches. With hubs (as with routers), users share the capacity; with switched media, the capacity is dedicated to all the users.

Part II is very brief and talks about bridging, essentially a precursor to switching. It talks about transparent bridging which is used for Ethernet and source route bridging for Token Ring. The difficulty in creating hybrids for these two is discussed, and indeed there usually has to be some kind of routing function. The important thing with transparent bridging (which has pretty much won the day by the way - forget about Token Ring at this stage) is the prevention of loops through the spanning tree protocol.

Part III deals with switching principles and architectures, including circuit switching, packet switching, and cell switching. Switches have pretty much the same functionality as bridges, breaking up collision domains and sharing a broadcast domain, but with greater port capacity and most of the functionality in the hardware. Virtual LANs (or VLANs) are a way to break up broadcast domains at Layer 2. WAN switches also do cell switching for ATM. The developments in switch fabrics and congestion management define where some convergence in routing and switching is taking place-in multilayer switches (Layer 2 and 3). This has also led to some high speed routers and switches.

Part IV, Routing, is what seems to fascinate Puzmanova the most. All routing has become Routing IP - other routed protocols like IPX and AppleTalk are fading away and more or less don't matter any more. This is good, because routing protocols are complicated enough. Older distance vector protocols (like RIP and IGRP) which use direction and hops and provide the whole routing table in updates, have given way (thankfully) to link state protocols (like OSPF and ISIS); the latter are tougher to administer but bring rapid convergence and all routers know of a topology change, whether it's due to a broken link or an added device, in very short order. Knowledge of routing protocols and their behaviors in different scenarios is the key to the highway for network administrators. Especially important is how different protocols play with each other, in terms of how they coexist, how the filter traffic or redistribute routes into one another, or how they tunnel (wrap packets from) one protocol into another. Routing protocols have extra intelligence but these smarts are processed and take up cycles, and anything that can be done to limit the overhead, by choosing a lighter weight protocol, by redistributing routes, or by using a dial-up link as a backup, is potentially helpful to the performance or the scalability of the network. Part IV also talks about the architecture of routers, in terms of their internal switching fabrics and switching processes. Then it discusses how the highest performance can be achieved with advanced mechanisms that distribute the effort among different devices - the foremost example is label switching or label swapping as used in MPLS, which is essentially a protocol that operates at both Layers 2 and 3, and which helps a network combine the speed of switching with the scalability of routing. This provides another example of the convergence that the book's title implies.

Part V deals with hot topics of the day: speeding things up with QoS and high performance, and optical networking. It also goes into a lot more detail on MPLS, which was alluded to in Part IV. The advantages and disadvantages of routing versus layer 3 switching, and the question of when to use a router and when to use a switch are detailed here. It explains how MPLS clearly distinguishes between path determination (which should mainly be performed at the edge) and packet forwarding. Packet forwarding is very fast because once the packet is labeled at the network edge, it quickly traverses the network, only requiring the label switching routers to perform the label processing without actually performing any lookups in the routing tables. Packet forwarding will be getting faster in the future with optical networking and the development of optical switches that can operate within MPLS networks, perhaps at the dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) level with multiprotocol lambda (wavelength) switching.

The appendices include an acronym glossary, standardization notes, troubleshooting guidelines, port transmission speeds, and some general useful numbers including port numbers, hex to binary conversion and multicast addresses.

The Book explain the SAP R/3 model in an excellent way. However the book is outdated and need update to reflect the progress made in SAP ERP during the last 10 years. I urge the authors or SAP to update the book with the latest developments.

Abdullah

After you go thru this book, you will find a very clear picture on how SAP works is already in your mind. This book gives your detail explanation, so easy to follow it up. Highly recommend this books!

I'm a FI/CO consulant with 6+ years experiences, after reading the book I find there are still some areas and key points that I just ignored or left uncertain in the past, the authors Gerhard Keller and Thomas Teufel present their knowledge and ideas in a very structured and comprehensive way.

Although process mostly keeps the same even with R/3 upgrading, there would still have some big changes between version 3.0 which this book refers to and the version 4.X. And I really hope this book could have second edition and explore more on the MTO process instead of only 30 pages in the last chapter.

This is really the best SAP book I've read!

From almost twenty SAP books that I have read, this book is what I need for large scale implementation. I will not complaint the length of the book. It is guiding what to do as a consultant.

If you want to understand what SAP's R/3-system really does, this book offers you the best way to get a grip on it. By mapping the system's transactions to the underlying business processes you can easily follow and understand the core functions of the model company. The EPC-methodology provides a perfect framework for describing processes in such a way that the user can understand the different threads as well as the guys who implemented the system. Reading this book I realized for the first time how I can benefit from the use of SAP in my company.

BTW: The book has more than 840 pages, not 448 as mentioned in the book information!

How does one make their particular business excel past all their competitors? "Six Disciplines Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier" is a thoroughly 'user friendly' and practical guide to help business owners answer that very question. Promoting 'The Excellence Business Model', which pushes balanced strategy and execution, successful entrepreneur and author Gary Harpst helps new business owners deal with anticipated and unexpected challenges as they occur and how they to avoid failure before such difficulties become an insurmountable problem. "Six Disciplines Execution Revolution" is a excellent pick for anyone looking to make their business venture an enduring success.

The principles for success in business are not unlike the principles that support and create success in many of life's endeavors. What Gary Harpst has tapped into, and what makes this book and the ideas behind it so unique, in comparison to others like it, is the bringing of a real world, dynamic involvment in everything that works its way toward effective strategy and "execution".

I have told people that the closest analogy I can come up with, to sum up my experience with Six Disciplines, is to reference a comparison of Bruce Lee to a classical Karate instructor. -- Where the Karate instructor would measure his talent by his ability to perform and display increasingly complex and difficult techniques, Bruce Lee would excel at becoming amazingly effective in the very simplist and most direct of movements. Bruce Lee was all about stripping away what is useless and absorbing what is useful and so, it seems, is Six Disciplines. The magic formula for success in Lee's makeup was his unwavering commitment to striving for excellence in the simple things that many other's tend to shrug off and take for granted as they search for the pursuit of excellence in complexity. That and Lee was a superb example of success through well balanced strategy and execution.

There's a vast amount of knowledge behind the scenes in this book and the good part is that Gary Harpst has managed to harvest the fruits of so much labor for all of us to benefit from, and in a way that can transform "pretty good" into "Great!"

With our struggling economy, the crisis with rising prices in energy and the continual, increasing rise in food prices, a large percentage of American businesses are struggling. The timing of this book could not have been better.

This book details a strategy execution program for your organization. The guides in this book with will assist any manager at any level with moving into a proactive stance rather than reactive. Surprises - some small, some business killers - are around every turn. This book deals with these issues head on in an open and honest way.

The field testing that was performed along with the best practices of know organizations takes a lot of pressure off for those who wish to pursue the advice in this wonderful new book. I can assure you that you will not have buyer's remorse. Buy copies for all of your managers and leaders. Michael L. Gooch, SPHR Author ofWingtips with Spurs

In my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit, I urge leaders and managers to "Avoid Management-by-Bestseller Syndrome." That's why this book gets my high-five rating. It fits with my Management Buckets system--and it's all about execution. As Peter Drucker said, "Vision without execution is delusion." Plus, the author's recommended books (in the resource section) give you a synergistic context. The book won't take you off-course. It's a complementary tool to help you walk the next steps.

"The first premise of this book is that what most business leaders think is their greatest challenge really isn't," says Harpst, who implemented more than 60,000 business management systems. "In most of my 20-year tenure as CEO of Solomon Software, I was in react mode, moving from one crisis to the next." So he makes the analysis simple with four quadrants focused on strong or weak strategy, coupled with strong or weak execution. The four quadrants: 1) growth wave, 2) fire-fighting, 3) profit wave, and 4) balanced and predictable.

It's all about getting to his quadrant of excellence: balanced and predictable. "This sounds easy," he writes, "but most organizations don't have the framework, the will, or the persistence to make the hard choices it requires." He adds, "Sustainable excellence isn't possible unless an organization learns to systemically increase its capability to execute, and to do so faster than the rate at which its challenges are growing. It's ironic that the better an organization executes today, the bigger its challenges will be tomorrow." (Been there, done that, right?)

I appreciate his comment that excellence is "the enduring pursuit of balanced strategy and execution." Harpst also reminds us that excellence is the "journey that never ends." I agree.

While the ultimate message put forth in this book is about executing your plans and how to go about that, it is very much based on what needs to be done first - and that is Planning, Goal-Setting. Without this foundation in place first, any actions in business will be haphazard, directionless and misguided.

Six Principles Execution Revolution is an excellent business source that offers some unique insights into how to put your business goals into action. Having a plan is one thing. Being able to make it happen is something else altogether. This book helps you do that.

How To Keep Your Man: And Keep Him For Good

Real Life Dramas - Volume One

Darren G. Burton

This book is one of the best programming language books I've read, along with "Oh! Pascal!" by Cooper and Clancy. It's use of humor and simple, straightforward examples, grab your attention right away and keep it through the entire book. It's hard to believe a programming book can be hard to put down, but this one was.

It also explains complex concepts in simple, elegant ways, just like good programs should be written.

I would recommend it to anyone learning FORTH, and I would recommend sections of it for people trying to understand specific concepts in any language. For example, the explanation of stacks was excellent!

I bought my own used copy of this book, but it is available in its entirety online, so it is unlikely to ever be reprinted.

Somebody REPRINT THIS BOOK!

"Starting Forth" is the only Forth book I own. After reading it, I was able to implement a Forth runtime system, compiler, and interpreter, from scratch, in 8086 assembly - the results can be found at home.earthlink.net/~jknapka/jkf.html . I credit this mainly to Leo Brodie's skill as an expository writer. The book is a gem; if someone were to reprint it, I for one would buy several copies, just in case.

The reason no one will reprint "Starting Forth" is that Forth is not sufficiently trendy. If we rename the language "JavaForth", we'll be drowning in reprints...

Sigh.

This book is a very clear introduction to programming and the stack. The cartoons are very entertaining and descriptive, and the book would make light reading even for beginning programmers. Those who program, but not yet in Forth, will also be happy with the quick introduction.

Why on earth is this fabulous book out of print?

A wonderful book. I bought mine in 1980, and a week later I had an old Northstar Z-80 computer running real-time behavioral experiments in FORTH at (so it seemed) blinding speed.

We need this book!

I bought "Succeeding with Use Cases" primarily for Part 3 on model-based specification. The book gives a "Blue Collar" approach for specifying operations in terms of change of state. The approach is highly pragmatic and aids writing precise, testable specifications. The author clearly explains what to do. I highly recommend this book.

Example after example; model after model! After reading this book, I was ready to begin implementation! Chapter 3, Operational Profiles, will convince and evangelize engineering and management. The degree of detail is perfect for the professional. Great Work!

I was really happy to see Richard's new book. I have always thought that if you are going to go to the effort of writing good use cases, then you should make use of that information as much as possible in the project. This book has a prominant place on my professional bookshelf, and I refer to it often.

Richard Denney gives some great information on using your project use cases in project management, quality control, and reliability. He has a wealth of experience that he shares throughout the book. His book is well written and easy to understand. I am not aware of any other book that covers this information in the context of a software project.

Once you are comfortable with writing use cases (and of course I must recommend my own book Applying Use Cases: A Practical Guide for that purpose), then definitely start exploring what you can do with the use cases once they are written by getting a copy of Richard Denney's book, Succeeding With Use Cases: Working Smart to Deliver Quality.

This book is about uses of use cases in software engineering. The focus is on doing and managing projects.
Topics are among others selection of standard products, management of project portfolios, or grounding projects in business goals. The last topic is an application of use cases to QFD, a process originally from the automobile industry. Other topics are reliability engineering, modelling and project management (this list is not complete).
All the topics of the book have use cases as a common factor. It is not an introduction into use cases. The application of use cases in this book goes further than what is described in the Rational Unified Process for example. Therefore other books are better in introducing the topic of use cases.
Demo excel sheets are available from the author. The examples are worked out excellently and instructive. The book focuses on the practicalites of software engineering and addresses primarily project leads, designer, architects and testers. Most of the material was new to new, although I have been using use cases for years. It will have the most value for organizations already modelling their software. In my opinion extreme programmers will not find it as useful.

I'm a software engineer, specializing in requirements and software quality. I've known about QFD and the House of Quality for over a decade, and I've been using Use Case methodology for years. This is the first (and perhaps the only) book which combines the two methodologies and explains in a straightforward yet sufficiently detailed way how to use these methodologies. If you are struggling with many requests from multiple customers and are trying to identify what is really important, you should read this book. In particular, if you want to satisfy the customers who drive your business, i.e., generate revenue, you need to read this book. This is a low-tech approach; all you need is a spreadsheet. Understanding Use Cases, QFD, or House of Quality is not a prerequisite. Even if you are already familiar with these methodologies, I think you will still learn a lot from this excellent book.

Beatryce Nivens is a valued member in the African American community, her contributions are culturally constructive, professionally progressive, and economically empowering.

We support her because her goal is to empower us.

BTW, if you gave Beatryce's book a rating of 4 or more, we clicked `yes' for the question "Was this review helpful to you?"

I enjoyed reading this book and it was very helpful. They did a good job of breaking the book up into sections and you can just read the areas that are most important to you at the time and the others at a later time. I enjoyed reading this book and will refer to it time and time again.

This book have made me stay focus on my goal to become a publish writer. I carry this book wherever I go. I make sure I introduce it to anyone who come across my path. The book is great. It's a blessing to have it as a part of my home library.

This book brought an array of emotions to surface. Laughter,idenity,tears and most important, an enlightment of black history and education. I beleive all people of color should read this book because there's parts in the book that males and females can relate to.

I found the book dynamic, self-motivating, encouraging and the profiles interesting. The book helped me to sitdown and really take a hard look at my life in terms of career and interests. I felt like I could take a chance and do anything I choose to do. Thanks Ms. nivens for a stimulating book that should be read my everyone searching and trying to decide their career paths. Jacqueline Fauntleroy

Successful Proposal Strategies for Small Businesses is a MUST-READ for anyone involved in the government contracting procurement cycle. Everyone from the technical level manager in business and government to the owners of businesses and top level government managers should have a working knowledge of the information presented in this book. Specific key people who should use this book as a technical reference are:
1. all business development staff in private industry
2. technical managers in both industry and government
3. all technical publications staff
4. all government buyers, and procurement staff: including technical officers, source selection officers and source selection board and committee members.

The business development principles illuminated in this book apply equally when businesses sell to and buy from other businesses.

Moreover, I would like to see a companion periodical publication, a CD-ROM or a newsletter, that updates the rapidly changing technological and regulatory aspects of the book. Subscribers to such a service would include all full-time business development and government procurement staff.

The book's style is that of a successful proposal. The book, as the successful proposals discussed by Mr. Frey, is an effective sales document as well as en extremely informative technical reference. The key strengths of this work are its completeness and depth. Mr. Frey provides us with a broad overview of the procurement process presented from the perspective of the business developer. The book clearly shows how the various members of a small business organization should interact to produce a successful business development effort.

At each stage of the business development process the book describes all of the necessary steps to a winning proposal. Detailed schedules, document templates, document samples and examples clearly illustrate every critical step required for planning and executing a successful proposal effort. The book presents all aspects of proposal writing including the development and use of themes, illustrations, style, and even the physical production and delivery of the proposal have in a "user friendly" manner. Mr. Frey's system of handling acronyms and his implementation of the glossary are extremely valuable to the reader. The completeness of the acronym list alone is, in my view, worth more than the price of the book.

Two key concepts developed throughout the book are: the concept of proposals as sales documents, and the critical requirement for solid and continuous upper management's support of the business and proposal development process.

Private companies, both small and large, will find this book invaluable as the blueprint for establishing, and implementing their business development infrastructures.

To set expectations this book is heavily slanted towards winning Government business. It is also applicable to large businesses as well as small ones. That said, the information in this unique book can be effectively used by consultants and companies intent on competing for commercial contracts. I am fortunate because I have experience in Government contracting (on both sides of the fence - writing RFPs and evaluating responses when I was a member of DoD, and responding to RFPs when I was in the DoD contracting industry), and in the commercial world where I have been working as a consultant since 1988. From my vantage point I see the value of this book as advice and guidelines for developing effective proposal strategies regardless of whether you are competing for Government or commercial business.

I have used this book as a ready reference since the first edition was published in 1997. This second edition reflects a major update to the original book in that the proposal management tools in the first edition were woefully out of date and the focus was not on some of the Government opportunities for small business, such as Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)that require a tailored proposal strategy. The second edition also addresses new Government initiatives for e-business and a plethora of other topics that were not present in the first edition.

If you are competing for Government business this is the most complete, accurate book I know of that covers the RFP-Proposal-Negotiation-Award process. Short of memorizing the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations), amassing years of proposal writing experience, and gaining the wisdom of knowing what works and what doesn't you will not find a more concise guide to the process. Also, you will benefit greatly from the wealth of tips and pointers that the author provides from his own extensive experience. If you are in the DoD contracting business, regardless of business size, I cannot overemphasize this book's value when it comes to cutting through the maze and providing a clear roadmap. If you are a proposal or capture manager I strongly recommend that you get a copy for every member of your team.

For the book's readers who are in the commercial sector the approach outlined in this book will add process and structure to your proposal writing efforts. The rigorous requirements imposed by the Government are too often lacking in the commercial process, which results in sloppy proposals that meander around issues and miss important client requirements. Also, because the proposal development process can be as large a task in the commercial sector, managing it can be a nightmare without a well thought out strategy for ensuring that all of the "t"s are crossed and "i"s dotted. The approach in this book practically hands you a ready-made process that you can apply to proposal development. This process will not only improve your ability to respond quickly and accurately to RFPs, but do so in an efficient manner. The result will be a significant competitive advantage.

For both sets of readers I think some of the advice, such as using the proposal as a marketing tool as well as a due-diligence instrument for responding to RFPs is excellent. For example, the author emphasizes backing up responses with examples to demonstrate claims. This is a powerful technique that I have used repeatedly to good advantage. It goes a long way towards assuaging client concerns about capabilities versus empty claims, and will turn a proposal that is merely responsive into one that is compelling.

Other things that make this book extremely valuable include the CD ROM of checklists and templates, and the numerous examples from the author's past proposals.

In my opinion this is the best book available for proposal development, and the only one that fully addresses every aspect of managing the proposal process for Government business. It should be on the shelf of anyone who responds to RFPs, and in the library of every company that does Government or commercial contracting.

Winning proposals and new work are the lifeblood of any business. Bob Frey has provided the business development and project management communities with a winning, working reference. Technical project managers and task leaders will benefit from a fuller understanding of the close relationship between outstanding contract performance and proposal awards. From philosophy to tools, this well-balanced book (and accompanying CD for quick-search) provides the organizational structure, choreographed processes, and in-the-trenches tips for successfully building and fueling a quality enterprise.

Don't let the trade price of this book deter you. Mr. Frey analyzes every aspect of the RFP-proposal process, and he includes a storehouse of resources to place you at a competitive advantage. No other book even comes close.

Mr. Frey's book covers the full lifecycle for capturing new business. He provides a clear strategy for identification and qualification of "winnable" opportunities,and a section-by-section cookbook for how to plan for and create a winning proposal. In our case, we have successfully applied the processes and guidelines found in this book to position us for capture of over $30,000,000 of new small business competitive Government contracts. This is good stuff!