Dot.con : How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era

Rating:
Summary: terrific and still timely
Review:

A "vast Shakespearean farce"--that's John Cassidy's take on the Internet bubble. Dot.con is an intellectually rewarding book. The writing is exceptional, the research impeccable. Like a fastidious historian, Cassidy tracks the bubble from its beginnings to its demise, including the economic and psychological ramifications of Sept 11th, 2001. Besides Schiller's "Irrational exuberance" and Startup.com, a documentary, dot.con stands as one of the best accounts of the dot.com debacle. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Historical Account of the Dot.com Bust
Review: Mr. Cassidy writes an excellent historical account of the dot.com bust. He spices the historical information with good descriptions of why certain things were done according to "business rules." Having worked for a defunct .com myself, I found this book to be quite informative about the one end of business all the technicians and developers didn't want to know about -- the cash flow. Looking back, many of the warning signs that Mr. Cassidy notes were there for all of us in the company to have seen...if we had known what to look for. An excellent work on a piece of history we should all study much closer.

Rating:
Summary: They could have been more thorough...
Review: An examination of the dot.com stock bubble. Amazing number of typos and wrong numbers. Interesting reading, but I really have a problem with books like this. They come off as knowing what was happening when it was happening. In reality, without the benefit of hindsight they are no more knowledgeable than we are.