Rating: 
Summary: Developing Bad E-Business Systems and Architecture books
Review: This book is a disaster. Chapters 1-4 are fairly light treatments of the current e-business environment and an overview for developing an e-business system. A few pages of overview on the practice of Business Process Engineering and Porter's Model of Competition are questionable at best. Why include them if you're not going to treat them seriously? The reality of business models intersecting with systems development is interesting, but the set-up here is way too light. Regardless, the wheels come off in Chapter 5, a chapter I had to read 3 times before finally giving up. The chapter uses terms that are not explained (persistance adapter), presents brand names of software products that are not explained (CORBA Security Service) and lists so many acronyms (CGI-BIN)that are not explained, I couldn't get much at all out of the chapter. Subsequent chapters repeated the same sins and added some new ones. To properly present complex system architecture concepts the book needs to build a baseline of understanding and then present ever expanding layers of advanced knowledge. This book simply jumps from topic to topic with many mentions of "we will discuss this later", "you read about this in the last chapter". There is no map to follow, no structure to guide you. Throw in too many random references and the reader is hopelessly lost. Granted, there are some well structured ideas (a well presented but short section on Application Management - Chapter 4). But, I would not reccomend this book at any price.
Rating: 
Summary: Mistitled but Valuable view of cultural and business process
Review: This E-Business "Manager's Guide" proved to be much more than the title promised. It would more aptly be subtitled a "CEO's, CFO's, COO's, CIO's, Strategic Planner's, and Manager's Guide". Following a chapter introducing the challenge at hand, the authors review the Competitive Strategy Model introduced in 1980 by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School. This Model - along with variants of the model - becomes a recurring point of reference throughout the book. While predictions are intentionally avoided, care is given to emphasize the difficulty of the several areas of organizational change that must be addressed. The rush to address the growing Internet economy has frequently been met with hastily created web pages, among other efforts to appear to be a part of the information age. The authors do insist that in order to survive upcoming economic changes, organizations must be able to not only change business practices, but also the entire strategic planning processes that form those practices. They look in detail at the many angles of this evident necessity.
Rating:
Summary: Utter garbage - too bad there aren't sub 1 star reviews
Review: What a collosal waste of time this book is.
The authors obviously don't have much of a grasp on e-business. The book is poorly organized and written in such poor style that it was a torture to finish. Poor writing, poor execution from infantile minds.
Rating:
Summary: Poor writing, poor theory, poor execution - a definite pass!
Review: Wow, what a stinker this book turned out to be.
I've always been impressed with this publishers technical and computer books but this book was pretty dreadful. A mishmash of material cobbled together with gum and tape - there are other books that deal with this subject -pick one of those.
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