Buying-the

This is heavy reading (but then again which book on costing isn't?). However it contain heaps of very useful and relevant approaches to the very elusive and difficult field of supply chain costing. What you find missing in other books on supply chain management is here!

Conducting research in supply chain costing, I found this book a very helpful source of information. The concept of supply chain management addressed by the product and the network dimensions are excellent, as this brings all aspects of material and information flows and partnerships in supply chain management together. Dividing each dimision in a decision (product design / network formation) and an operations phase (product manufacture / interfaces) provides a framework for supply chain costing. This framework is used to show how various cost management techniques (e.g. target costing) are applied in supply chains. Still, the interlinkes between the dimension could have been addressed clearer. Furthermore, the aspects of managing all costs along the supply chain are only partly covered. for example, the cost of organisational designs and negotiations / contracting in the supply chain are not discussed. Still, the book is a must for people interested in supply chains and cost management. Both the concepts presented and the case studies provide very valuable information.

All companies, from the largest to the smallest, perform technology acquisitions. There are definite steps in the sequence, from the determination of need to the final step in the integration. For example, even the basic choice of a compiler for development has stages of determining the needs, performing research, acquiring the compiler and integrating it into the enterprise. The key to success is to consider the purchase of new technology to be a process, subject to rules that control the decision making structure. BR> Each step is clearly defined with instructions on how to do it well. While the advice is often an apparent statement of the obvious, that is not a drawback. In business, the best advice one can often hear is a simple, accurate remark repeated over and over. All too often, technology decisions are made on emotional attachment rather than environmental or economic fit. By following the advice laid out in this book, the influence of emotions and politics can be reduced.
Making the right decisions concerning what technology to use is a decision that all businesses are required to make. If you follow the rules in this book, it will not be made any easier, in fact it may be made harder. However, they will increase your chances of making the correct one, and that is far more important than making the easy one.

Technology Acquisition: Buying the Future of Your Business is a great book for establishing procurement best practices or confirming existing practices. This book is not a high-level overview but provides you with detailed step-by-step procedures, case studies, and a wealth of examples. As a consultant, each company that I work with is different and this book has helped me to establish a complete procurement cycle with the client. Many companies, it seems, do not have a cradle to grave procurement practice and therefore do not understand what a project manager should be responsible for. This book gives you a starting place. Also, it is evident that the author is speaking from experience - he has done what is in the book and the examples demonstrate a real working knowledge of the topic. I highly recommend this to any person starting a new project.

This directory is great for finding a manufacturer of a product that you want to buy. It will list all the manufacturers of that product. Many will show helpful diagrams of the products. Sometimes you just want to see what a bladder to hold 1000 gallons of water looks like. Children should walk through these books periodically to see how complex the industrial community is. Some manufacturers work out of their garage and ship internationally because they may be the only ones in the country whe make that specialilzed product. I use it to locate customers who might want to use our discount full color printing for their catalog sheets. To sell something you have to have a flyer. Some of the 33 different books you get include the catalogs of manufacturers. Prior to the internet this was one of the few ways to get information on an industry or a product. You get a lot for your money with these although you may not use it as a reference book each day.They are available in every library but it is a lot more convenient to have your own. I didn't know you could by it from Amazon. Brian Nelson

My preivous review on this was for the manufacturing set. THis is for the food industry for which I know nothing. Sorry. Brian

This is a great book for the average Joe, easy to read and understand. I read it in one weekend and was truly enlightened. This is a must have for the informed new home buyer.

This is a must have book if you are buying a new home! I read this book in two days and loved every minute. It tells you everything you need to know to get the home of your dreams built correctly. I highly recommend you read this book and have anyone else who wants to buy a new home read it too!! Two thumbs way UP!!

Because they offer a fantastic diversity of flavors and represent great value in today's glutted wine market, the best wines of Australia and New Zealand are in high demand world-wide. Mr. Halliday is today THE authority on these wines, one of the most reliable wine critics out there, and this book further establishes his reputation with the most up-to-date information available. Here he has selected the best wineries, organized alphabetically, with statistics and tasting notes following. He is unabashedly biased towards these wines, but his notes are exceptionally well written without sounding stuffy or flowery. If you're into Australian wines, this book will be an INVALUABLE resource and will point you towards some really memorable and iconoclastic wines. If there's a flaw, I'd say it could be better indexed, allowing you to more easily compare, say, Australian shirazes or wineries of New South Wales. But if you're an adventurous wine drinker, you're certain to make some excellent discoveries with this book.

I am of Australian origin and was recently in Australia, among other things, looking for Aussie wines to start my own cellar. His book was well written, and, unlike most other wine critics, does not rate his own wines as a mark of his integrity. We found many good, medium priced wines and reccomend this book for anyone interested in Australian wines.

This is an excellent book for any Miata MX-5 enthusiast, well written with plenty of pictures. Of particular interest is the extensive and detailed history of the MX-5 with wonderful photos of prototypes and early designs.

As this book was written in the UK, it has a decided UK (actually a worldwide) flavor. Although not a negative, if you're from the U.S., it causes a few double-takes when you first see pictures of right-hand drivers. You'll also quickly get used to the language differences: boot for trunk, tonneau cover for boot, hood for convertible top, and bonnet for hood.

Written in 2002, the last year model covered is the 2001. But since very little has changed since then, the book is not seriously lacking in covering the modern versions.

Buy this book if you're interested in Miata MX-5 history details: model changes, design, production, worldwide differences. Don't buy if you're interested in performance improvements, racing, repairs, or modifications.

Nice book. Easy to read when you're not English. Nice pictures. You have to buy the book when you own a MX-5/Miata or you want to buy one.

Looking to buy a pet bird, but not sure where to start? Start here. This book covers common types of birds, what you need for each, what to expect from them, and how much they might cost. The book seems a little older than the 1994 copyright, though. It warns against buying imported, wild-caught parrots. This was good advice then, and even better now that it's illegal to import them.

There isn't a lot of information on selecting the right bird species. That's why I love this book. I am, by nature, an indecisive person, and this book has helped me find the right bird. Please try to get a copy of this book. I learned about birds I had never heard about before (such as the Pekin robin), and it really helped open my eyes to the incredible world of birds!

I just received Flipping properties two days ago. The good news is that it is a very easy book to read and comprehend. I have already read it cover to cover twice. The book provides some excellent forms and is very good in defining basic Real Estate 101. It gives some good ideas and theories, Gee, it seems a lot of the reviews in RE are very generous.

I see some holes in the theory of "Flipping Properties". The major theme of Bronchick & Dahlstrom is to go out and find (or hire someone, " a scout") a distressed house with a motivated seller, make an offer, approximately 80% of the value of the home, Make a small deposit, ( $500-$1000) ,while promising the current owner they can close within a short period of time. Then, or concurrently, find an investor, ( retailer) to purchase the property and while giving yourself a profit.

This sounds good an very easy to do, but how many people or contacts would you or could you find to finance 80-100K? I am talking about the average person. The only suggestion is joining an investment club? And networking? Great, I am going to front money to trust people on the Internet? Also, even if you can flip the property, why would an investor continue to use your services on a double close? Lastly, the Flipper is required to have an exit strategy . The answer is if the investor backs out, then just purchase the property yourself. Great, I am sure I will get bank funding when I am already holding a note on my house for 300K! The book does not give enough info on how to finance, HUD, foreclosures, Etc, Also, the tiny little adds in newspapers doesn't sit well with me, as you will see.

Overall , the book is interesting, and I believe you can get an idea of the theories behind flipping properties but this book is not the total answer, I am going to take some of the info and combine it with info from other books and financial institutions.

Easy to read. Just the sample forms and ads alone are worth the $15 price. You may need to understand the mechanics of real estate investing to follow well. Covers some techniques that only a seasoned investor/dealer would consider but I found the step-by-step to rehab a property and a link to how not to do business under your personal name very helpful. I created a checklist for my project folder so we don't miss anything. The basics work! This book is a good stepping stone to your garden of financial freedom.
I don't see however doing a double closing or convincing a non-delinquent owner to sign over his deed to me. My experience this last year is that I have had to Overbid on properties and have absolutely no contingencies (weasel clauses) just to get a counteroffer. Make a note of the basics and investigate from there. There's no magic, only work. PUSH247

This book is a "step-by-step" guide through one of the very profitable and lucrative Real Estate investing principles. You'll get all the fundamentals needed to successfully complete your first flipping deal. You'll be on your way!

I've bought a lot of Bronchick's manuals through years and made hundreds of thousands of dollars with them. One of the first deals was an out-of-state seller whom I found using one of the advertising techniques suggested in the book. Since it was one of my first deals, I wasn't brave enough to undertake all the expensive repairs (it was a $500k house), so I decided to advertise to "investors-rehabbers". I used a classified add (like the one in the book) and within a week I sold it for $95,000 more than my purchase contract. That's about 3 weeks total that made me more money than I had been making as an electrical engineer with a Master of Science degree. You guessed right, soon after that I was able to leave my corporate job!

Please realize, the above transaction is not typical, most of my profits are in the range of $3,000 to $20,000, but again it doesn't take much to do a few of those a month either. You also need to know that this is not a "get rich quick" business, it takes time to learn it, but it is one of the most hassle free and most profitable businesses out there. And it's one of not many businesses you can start with very little or no money.

If you ask me why to buy this book, I'd tell you this. First, if you're just starting, this book will teach you about flipping properties, which is one of the easiest and risk-free (if you learn how) ways to make money in Real Estate, great place to start! Second, it teaches you in a methodical easy-to-learn way the mechanics of Real Estate transaction. Plus, it gives you all the legal paperwork and agreements you need (which are time tested and proven). And you can't beat the price -- it is soooo cheap!

Happy investing, and say to your boss bye-bye!!!

P.S. Almost forgot... Your relatives, neighbors and friends may tell you that "flipping" is illegal. What they are referring to is a scam where some investors together with appraisers defrauded lenders, and that has nothing to do with the concept described in this book. ...

"The Right Dog for You" tries to do several things. It doesn't accomplish any one of them amazingly thoroughly, though its little charts of temperamental traits are more detailed than others I've seen. It probably needs to be restructured, re-edited, to live up to its potential.

This book's best trait is its detailed temperament charts. Tortora's rated each breed of dog in sixteen, count 'em, sixteen "Dimensions" of temperament. Wow. My first reaction was that the charts give a false sense of objectivity, but poring over them gives you a broader sense of a dog's character, definitely. I've spent much more time with those charts than with the rest of the book. Just seeing someone thinking in a careful way about different traits of temperament really gives you a way to approach the whole idea of deciding on a dog. It's a nice model to follow, even if you don't completely buy the specific ratings.

The text descriptions of individual breeds can be really pleasing -- Tortora is a behavioral problem-solver and he includes lots of offhand anecdotes -- but they're quite brief, and they aren't satisfying next to more complete sources. Most of them start with a terse description of the dog's appearance, which along with the line drawings still don't tell me much. The book doesn't mention some pretty basic stuff about behavior, either. For example: Greyhounds tend to chase first and think later because they're "sight hounds." People who own Greyhounds are full of cautions about that trait, and ways to work around it. This book doesn't mention it. The Greyhound is rated as needing lots of outdoor activity, I guess, but the "potential behavioral problems" mentioned don't include running into traffic at 40 mph when it sees a rabbit. Certain terriers' descriptions don't talk about digging when they really should, either. Then too, you really need to go to another source to learn that Basenjis can climb ANYTHING, which is a pretty important thing to know. (Tortora also makes another common Basenji mistake, assuming because they don't bark that they don't vocalize. Basenjis yodel, and scream, quite loudly sometimes.)

Getting past the breed listings, the latter half of the book is a series of rating exercises. You answer a series of questions about your social tendencies, say, and then the book provides you with a rating scale and you match yourself up with dogs. I like this idea, it's just great. It's not perfect here, though. This is the part of the book that suffers from being kind of poorly structured, at least for me.

For one thing, there are charts after each chunk of questions, but I don't find the charts easy to work with. It can be hard to find a particular breed on them. The whole section of the book isn't well-laid-out; it reads like a bunch of stops and starts all running together. If you open to a particular page you can't really tell where you are. A little white space and maybe some way to break up the text would help.

Even with a little layout help, though, I still can't see why things like the height and weight of each breed wouldn't be up with the breed descriptions, rather than described as a tallest-to-shortest range in a chart at the back of the book. It feels like the first half of the book was written separately from the second half, and they need to be edited together. I don't read references front-to-back, and the back of this one feels like it wants me to do that.

Speaking of the way I like to use a reference, the index to this book isn't great. Individual breeds aren't consistently in it -- all the terriers have just one reference to "terriers, breeds and functions of" -- and even when they are, the number of references is incomplete. It's not easy to find everything the author says about, say, Soft-Coated Wheaten Terriers.

This is a decent place to start in thinking about a dog. Just the model of breaking temperament down as carefully as this author has is a great tool. Once you're seriously considering any particular breed (or that mix at the pound), though, you're really going to want to see more substantial stuff about that type of dog -- from breeders, and owners, and other more complete sources of information. (Probably that would be true of any book like this. I'm not sure of any other, better choices. "Your Purebred Puppy, a Buyer's Guide" seems like another good possibility.)

I am constantly amazed at the carelessness with which people select a family pet. I guess that's why the shelters are so full. This book is a must have for anybody considering getting a dog. The book is an older one, and some of the breed personality traits have changed over time. But at the very least, you will walk away from this book with the understanding that a dog cannot adjust its nature to suit your lifestyle. If you choose a Border Collie, she will herd (or use that extra energy to tear your sofa up). If you choose a beagle, he will howl (and run, and eat...). Don't want to vacuum often? DON'T get a golden! Sorry, but that's the way it is. We bred them this way, you know. And the dog's can't do anything about it. This book will give you the tools you need to make an intelligent choice. Good luck!
Recommended Companion, "Don't Shoot the Dog" by Karen Pryor

I am now buying my third copy of this book. I loan it out to any aquaintance thinking of getting a breed of dog they are not truly familiar with. If propsective owners went through this book, there would be much fewer animals ending up in rescue! Here are "The Right Dog for You"'s major advantages:

1) The book is honest about breeds, warts and all. Tortora is a man who has seen how different breeds go wrong, and it shows in his writing. Some reviewers don't like this somewhat negative slant, but I think it is absolutely vital when picking the right dog. Books that gush about how each breed is "wonderful in it's own way" aren't giving you the info you need to make an informed choice about what dog to spend the next decade of your life with.

2) The information is broken out in a consistent, analytical way that makes comparisons easy. I love those detailed temperment charts! Also, having indoor / outdoor activity levels listed is vital for making a good match between your lifestyle and a breed's habits.

3) Near the end of a book is a series of "quizzes" about your lifestyle and ideal dog, which result in a list of compatible breeds. If you've taken a Cosmo quiz, you can do this! It's strightforward, and gives you a specific set of breeds to look up in other sections of the book, or in other resources. I like the fact that this makes it harder to cheat, like you might in leading other books. "Gosh, that's a gorgeous dog! Hmmm ... vigorous exercise and assertive personality? .... Well, I guess that could be me!"

The book's major disadvantages:

1) Not intuitively laid out. The front and back halves of the book would be more useful if they were integrated together. Those quizzes belong at the beginning of the book, along with clear instructions.

2) Not very attractive. I'd hate to see someone pick up a book with poor information but prettier pictures, but it's likely to happen.

Once you pick a breed, by all means look to a breed book for more information and specific tips. But to know just what you are getting yourself into, read this book FIRST.

If you are expecting the type of information you got in Ms Begoun's first book, you want get it in this one.

For instance, I used the BEST BUYS list in the first book extensively and found it to be reliable. This edition has thirty or so items in each category with no mention of the best prices. Also, in her first book I often disagreed with Ms. Begoun on products I have personally used as did many of the blind test groups. There are no test groups in this edition just facts, formulas and ingredients.

I also found her own product line in the book a little too self promoting.

Unless you are in need of a list of ingredients in cosmetics I can't see any point in this book as a reference.

Although I don't agree on all points in this book, I found this to be an interesting read! I have tried numerous cosmetics and skin products and have found some of her recommendations were great and some disappointing. The one thing I wholeheartedly agree on in this book is how so many companies try to rip us off by using fancy French words. Some people actually do feel great when they know they've spend an extraordinary amount for a product. Why pay $38 for lipgloss when you can buy something very similar for $15 or $6?! Ooo! Ooo! Probably because the product must be great if it's $38 and all the movie stars use it! Pretty soon word spreads about the GREAT $38 gloss, well it MUST be great because EVERYONE is talking about it! Give me a break!

Yes, it's true, you will not agree on everything you read in this book since we all have our own tastes, opinions and infuences. But Paula does have an extensive list of recommendations for each category which is definitely helpful. As stated in an earlier review, Paula does have her biases, but I still think anyone who loves buying cosmetics or anyone who is starting to buy cosmetics should at least read this book once to get some ideas.

As a self-confessed cosmetics junkie,and a person who has to take extra-special care of my skin,I found this book to be the utterly perfect guide.I agree with Ms. Begoun's views on matte,realistic colors,but even if I didn't,the information on the efficacy of both cosmetics and skincare would be enough reason to buy this book. She states right from the beginning that her views on cosmetics colors are her own,and I agree that the trend towards shiny and/or bright colors has taken over the industry almost to the exclusion of more sophisticated colors.The factual information on ingredients is wonderful-I always had an instinct of doubt about the trend to "natural" ingredients and new-agey ad copy,and now I know why.
As far as Ms Begoun's own product line,I am looking forward to trying it. I think it's wonderful that she put her money where her mouth is and came up with a product line that will meet the shortcomings of the products she reviewed. To me,that only makes sense.If this line meets its claims(which are not unrealistic and don't promise to give you "inner serenity" or eternal youth),then she has done many women a service.And the point she makes of sunscreen is wonderful. Scientists have noted that it's not so much the natural aging process that destroys skin,it's the effect of the sun over time that plays the biggest role.Our great great great grandmothers were ahead of us in this respect!
I know I'll still buy some high-end products,just for the "luxury" aspect of them(Trish McEvoy's lipgloss compact is one-there's hardly anything in there,but the credit-card size of the compact got me,and the tiny lipbrush in there is actually quite workable). But I'll do so forewarned and forearmed with knowledge,not because I've been taken by hopelessly unrealistic hype.
Oh,and I ESPECIALLY appreciated the info on foundation and powder tones. My skintone,like that of the largest percentage of women,is indeed based on yellow tones,and it's only in recent years that cosmetic companies have even begun to acknowledge this.What took them so long? I want to enhance and refine my face,not change or mask it.(The book reinforced many things concerning this that I'd already found to be so,ie Aveda,amongst a very few others,having a decent range of foundations and powders with yellow tones.And Prestige and Jane,two drugstore lines,having a good selection of colors and textures-I was actually very surprised and pleased with Prestige,as I usually scorn low-end makeup.)
Great book,can't wait for the update!(I'm looking forward to the review of "KissMe" mascara by Blinc-I hope it's safe, as I love this stuff,LOL).