economics-software

At the present time (Dec 2003) this software is not compatible with Mathematica 5.0 (check the mathstatica website) and the trial verison of Mathematica which comes with the book expires after 30 days.

This is a splendid book that comes bundled with marvellous software.

(i) Book: The book is roughly the level of Hogg & Craig and up. It is academically precise (no waffle) with an emphasis on problem solving rather than proofs. The CD includes an identical MATHEMATICA version of the book (with navigation palettes that open when you load the software). So, if I want to look up how to create a copula or a mixture distribution or find the pdf of an order statistic or generate random numbers from some arbitrary custom pdf no-one has even heard of before, I just go to the electronic index, click on the entry, and I immediately have a structure for my own example, without having to re-type anything. Very neatly done! And with the bundled software, I can solve problems in a few seconds that took me hours and hours last month. It all fits like a glove and it is a pleasure to use. More importantly, perhaps, it is fun to use. My only gripe is that it would have been nice if some of the pictures in the printed text where in color, but this is a tiny minor gripe because they are already in color in the electronic version anyway.

(ii) Software: The book comes packaged with the MathStatica CD. Book owners can register it for free (basic version); you can evaluate everything in the book with it (it is not crippled) and it includes online ?function Help. I have used several MATHEMATICA applications and the standard/quality of mathStatica is just way ahead. Application packages normally cost $$$ or $$$ or more, so the bundling of mathStatica with this book is like getting Xmas early. Getting a password was a breeze and it turned up in my email box within about 30 seconds.

Most impressed with the book and with mathStatica.

I waited for several years for this book to come out and it was worth the wait. The additional insights I obtained in the first few chapters were worth the price. The CD-Rom contains some HEAVY WEIGHT math and programming that eclipse the time and abilities most have to devote to this process. Rose and Smith have come up with a suite of tools that truly expand the use and power of an already great program. If you buy only one Mathematica book, buy this one. If you buy only one statistics book, buy this one.

As someone involved in the consulting area for many years, I was unable to find any new idea that would make worthwhile to spend money in this book. Almost everything that is mentioned here can be grabbed from free articles availables in Internet,about this subject. Additionally, there are a good number of books that will help you much more to plan and implement ERP's. Last, but not least, the book only have a handful of small pictures and tables. Unacceptable for a modern book about business and technology topics.

This book provides a high-level overview of many of the issues surrounding an ERP implementation. However, the coverage is superficial and repetitive. I think a 10-page summary of this material would be much more useful than this 200-page book. Often I felt like the book was more of an advertisement for a consulting company than a serious treatment of the issues involved in implementing an ERP system. Still, it may help one who is inexperienced in this area to know some of the important questions to ask before and during the implementation.

This book is very useful for choose right ERP package and implementation.

This book is makes a difficult subject even more difficult. It assumes that you already know alot of the concepts in it. It kin of leaves you stumbling around in the dark. I hate this book and the person who wrote it with a passion. A good author should be able to explain concepts in clear organized language, I do not care how difficult.

Had to buy this book for my class. On the surface it looked OK -- plenty to screenshots and examples, but the problems arise when you try to read the long paragraphs. Language could have been clearer.
Book assumes solid knowledge of Excel, which should be expected of students, but still, some things should not be taken for granted :)
Another classic problem -- chapter 4 refers to examples mentioned in chapter 2. I hate this kind of cross-referencing !

Don't buy it if you can live without it.

...

I'll make two separate sets of comments - one for professors and one for students.

Students first... This will be a difficult course no matter which textbook you use. Having said that, I would say that the text is about average in terms of readability in comparison to other texts on the subject. There are plenty of realistic cases to illustrate basic decision/ management science concepts, as well as a very useful CD, with which I recommend that you become well-acquainted as the course moves forward. Not much has changed since the last edition, so you may be able to get by with a previous edition if the textbook (authored by Eppen). Be advised, however, that some of the chapter materials have been re-arranged, including the exercises at the end of each chapter.

For professors... You are probably already aware that this course can be challenging for the professor as well as the student, esp. with respect to how math-intensive you wish the course to be. I think Moore & Weatherford is an excellent text, but it is written as an advanced graduate text. I have been able to "tone it down" for undergraduates by accompanying it with a nice, soft, theory-oriented text on decision/ management science (featuring the teachings of Herbert Simon and some of the early decision science theorists). The text is accompanied with ample instructor resources including a very useful CD with solutions, decision science software. I would engage the students w/ the CD as early as possible. I have also found that the best exams for this course are take-home exams - give the students some moderately challenging decision models to formulate and solve, and focus your evaluation primarily on how well they are able to interpret the results and propose recommendations for decision makers, and secondarily on whether they were able to get the software to spit out the right answers.

Obviously, a book of this nature will draw criticisms simply because it covers the Microsoft turnaround and the people behind the company's success. People who dislike Microsoft already will most likely continue to dislike the company and won't find much to enjoy in this book. But I found the story to be an interesting and fair account of the Internet challenges facing Microsoft and their resulting strategies. Andrews gives great background on each of the players and makes you feel that these are real people, not some robots that are out to take over the world. The book kept me interested throughout and I look forward to Paul Andrew's future books. Good job!

There's been a lot of blather from competitors about Microsoft's so-called predatory ways -- some of it, I understand, directed at this book. But the real reason Microsoft is so feared and often loathed is that they compete so well. How many companies of Microsoft's size in any industry would be fleet-footed enough to completely reinvent their overall strategy to address a sea change in their market? This book tells you how this remarkable company did it. Get to know the real players who helped turn this battleship around -- and kept Bill Gates very very wealthy.

I am writing this after the appeals court has done the smart thing and voided the breakup remedy and exposed Judge Jackson for the little punk he is (His bias was obvious during the trial, despite MS's missteps. Congress should impeach him pronto). So I have perspective many of the other reviewers don't.

All I can say is: Ah-hah. Ah-hah. The appeals court may have found that MS maintained its monopoly illegally, largely because it didn't provide sufficient evidence that it needed those contracts with PC makers to protect the proprietary elements of Windows. And they may be right (although I think the general rapacity of the software industry is enough). But it agreed with nothing else, and I think the author of this book has been more than vindicated against his critics.

Yes, he had access to top MS officials, and probably shares their views of things. But you don't need that to agree that Netscape did everything all wrong ... they walked out of the HTML 3 standards conference, made their browser as incompatible with IE as they could just because they were so afraid. Their entire business plan could be summed up as "Bill Gates must be incredibly dumb and tone-deaf, so we'll make all the noise we want about how we can make them irrelevant and they won't notice until it's too late. Oh, and if this somehow doesn't work, let's get the Justice Department to sue them."

Well, it tells you a lot about this strategy (as if you couldn't guess) that Netscape today is just another cog in the AOL Time Warner media machine. The author is particularly good at noting what has not been much noticed elsewhere ... how Netscape, especially in the infamous 1995 meeting, seemed to be working hand-in-glove with Justice to create the appearance of improper competition on Microsoft's part (Funny how, when Larry Ellison (and Bill Gates' biggest service to America is keeping that guy from taking his place, believe me) pays people to sniff through DC trash to find connections between MS and DC lobbying groups, the news is more about the latter aspect of the story than the former).

But the larger issue that this book doesn't get into is how the New Economy guys, all devout members of the Church of the Invisible Hand, were done in by their own economic beliefs working too well.

That basically went that MS would become, and remain, hidebound and lazy like all companies with little real competition (of course, many companies have said they competed against Microsoft, which comes as a real surprise to anyone who has used many of their products ... Linux especially). After all, hadn't IBM and Apple before MS? Our laissez-faire theory tells us so, that economics will trump all human ability ... right?

Well, no one ever thought to imagine that maybe a company that has achieved the kind of market dominance that MS has might just retain the competitive instincts that got it there (as plainly logical as that might be). You're going to have to wait a while for MS to get soft. The story is not that it was easy to win the web war or that MS shouldn't have been at risk of losing it in the force place. It was that they got into it at all. The market is supposed to reward supertankers that turn on a dime, isn't it? (In fact, I believe MS's problems may have come from it being too eager to compete sometimes, owing to Gates' oft-cited paranoia that somewhere out there are two guys in a garage building the future that he won't see coming until too late. But should he be penalized for not forgetting his own company's history?....

Along the way, it was hilarious at first but scary later on to see how standard business practices, and things that would be recognized as smart moves in any other business, were invariably transformed into flaws whenever MS did them. Add lots of features to your OS so a broad segment can find it useful? "Bloatware." Keep in mind your customers who are just casual end users? "Dumbing down the operating system?" (Reminds me of Dilbert: "Hey, you're one of those condescending Unix users!" "Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a better computer") The looniest was, and still is, Linux, dedicated to the principle that people who don't make money from what they do do a better job than people who do. (And this system is often pushed heavily by some of the most libertarian, pro-free enterprise types around! I still do not get it)

So, seven years after the Web became the Internet's killer app, Microsoft has won, and IMO deservedly so. Deal with it. If you weren't in their tent, you should just cash out, shake Bill Gates' hand like a good sport, recognize that they won because they just played a better game, go enjoy a nice retirement and stop wasting the public's time.

Being a person working in SF bay area, I quickly learned that this book was among the inferiors of the book on the Valley.
The descriptions are too general -- the interviews were too shallow and no specific issues are presented in a clear-lighted manner.

Good selections for books on the Valley I think is "Accidental Empires" by Cringely.

This is a somewhat entertaining read if you can get over the basic fact that the information is outdated. Almost all of the statistics are from 1998 and some of the companies cited as future stars never realized their potential. It was relevant in 1999 but quickly lost all significance in the dot-com meltdown of 2000 that is still continuing as I write this in 2001. Dot-coms now require a path to profitability and companies just don't engage in the same behaviors any more.

This books still has value for anyone wanting to know some historical background from the times of "irrational exhuberance" but the changes in business priorities that have taken place since this book was written have doomed it to irrelevance.

In light of the recent declines in tech stocks, you must give author Karen Southwick credit - for the most part she's profiled companies that are still around, although they've taken some hits. Southwick synthesizes her observations of Silicon Valley over the last decade or so. She takes a broad and sustained look at the practices of such companies as Ascend, Audodesk, Ciena, Cisco, Crossworlds, Net Noir, Open Market, Peoplesoft, Yahoo and others. Using an anecdotal, feature-story style, Southwick dissects these firms, covering CEOs' personal histories, corporate funding and corporate culture - down to dress code and wilderness team-building exercises. Some stories aren't new (insiders know Yahoo's culture is wacky) and there are some small inaccuracies (i.e. you could challenge Crossworlds CEO Katrina Garnett's argument that turnover is still a massive problem). Nonetheless, whether you're an insider or just an observer seeking an overview of Silicon Valley and its players, we at getAbstract.com recommend this accessible, reader-friendly compilation.

If you haven't figured out that Larryland is run like a private empire and the founder has an ego to match his billion dollar bank account, then this book is a good place to start. Karen Southwick, a former Forbes ASAP editor has written this book without any direct access to Ellison. Ok, at least it's not the softball co-authored love letter that SoftWar is, but unfortunately, not by much.

The book covers the history of Oracle from its development of the first commercial relational database (written for the CIA based on published articles by IBM) to its present day situation as a multi-billion dollar behemoth that is hated by both competitors and, in Southwick's views, customers. The book covers the rise of Oracle in the go-go 80's when it paid sales reps in gold coins to sell software that wasn't ready, to its adolescent financial crisis, the unceremonial firing of every known Oracle executive other than Ellison himself, and finally the resurgence of Oracle as a major industry force. Unfortunately the book has less drama than the average hair-band "Behind the Music" episode on MTV.

I admit when I read excerpts, I had high expectations for the rest of the book. There may be an interesting story about Larry Ellison and Oracle, but this isn't it. On the other hand, if you're eager to compile a who's-who list of fired Oracle execs (Bennioff, Bloom, Conway, Jarvis, Lane, Nussbaum, Scholes, Siebel, Sumner...) and you want to hear them dish, hey it's cheap.

I was expecting a more balanced account of Larry Ellison and the rise of Oracle as a software giant. As an unauthorized biography, I expected the author to dish some dirt. However, other than praise for being a technical visionary, Ellison is portrayed as the Darth Vader of Silicon Valley. That being said, the text is a compelling read. On the business side, the text focuses on problems and solutions within sales and customer service. Very little was presented on Oracle's development practices.

The book seems to accurately portray Larry Ellison's strengths and weaknesses, especially his arrogance in dealing with other people. Too bad the author couldn't have gotten Ellison himself to say more.

In this book C.J. Date - renowned for his writings on relational database theory - dives into rules based approaches for application development (Part 1 in the book) and database design (Part 2 in the book). He clearly states that the book is strongly influenced by his enthusiasme for business rules, which becomes clear in Part 1, where Date is spinning his wheels. Part 2 is where the rubber hits the road.

Part 1 turns out to be a discussion on how business rules and declarative statements - presentation rules, application rules and database rules - can drive the automated development of applications. The claims made have some foundation in that rules based expert systems have been around for a long time and use declarative statements as their main driving force. However, a system that will automate the creation a platform independent, complex application with a consistent, efficient and effective user interface from declarative statements alone, is something that is too far from current day reality to peak interest. Next to that, Date keeps this section fairly abstract and leaves too many gaps open to satisfy questions generated by his - now and then - bold statements. In time Part 1 will probably turn out to be visionary. Regardless, the section in it's current presentation doesn't warrant the subtitle of the book: "The Business Rules Approach to Application Development".

Now, Part 2 however, is where things start to get interesting. The first few chapters are partial relational theory refreshers. It's what follows in Chapter 12 through Chapter 14 (of the 15 in total) where the pages show tire marks. Here Date makes the mindshift from logical database design as most people know it - ERD, NF and FD - to the core of the logical database being nothing more, or less, than the formalized representation of the business *rules*. He provides solid reasoning that this fact is true in a much more literal fashion than one might expect. The stepchildren of the RDBMS's - the integrity constraints and predicates, the business rules if you will - are what databases are all about.

In all, 22 pages out of the 129 that hit the spot. If you appreciate sales-pitch like visionary texts or are a relational theory die-hard, you'll probably consider it a sweet enough lemon to buy it at it's current price of USD 25. Otherwise, give this one a miss.

First off, it is difficult to give a fair review to a book with a copywrite date of 2000 that I am just now reading. The concepts are interesting and reasonable, but I don't think the state of things is as bad as the author suggests. Section II wraps up by stating that business rules *should* be able to be expressed in constraints, but the SQL vendors have let us down in this area. I find that most of the constraints that the author describes are supported by Oracle 8i which is not a new release of the product. Much is made of automating business rules using Rule Engines, but it seems that these can be handled in the DBMS. The advice on data modeling in the last chapter is good, and I think you can come away with a different way of looking at things. After reading the book, though, I am not overwhelmed with the urgent need to have my team invest in a Business Rules Engine.

At first I was pleased with this Book, but as I progressed through the Chapters I got progressively more disappointed. In conclusion, I think the comments on the back page say it all "provides a good grounding" - I'd rate it 'average to good' - but certainly not 'excellent'.
What lets it down are the pitiful worked examples. They are key to explaining the concepts, but the choices are terrible. They focus on Inventory Control, but I wonder if the author has ever done any real analysis in this arena?
In Chapter 4 a few examples are introduced, that reappear throughout the book, for example :
(a) "Suppliers S1 and S4 are always in the same City" - and this is reaffirmed as 'being not all unrealistic'
(b) "Suppliers in Athens can move only to London or Paris"
(c) "Average shipment quantities never decrease"
but in my 25 years experience in systems design I could never imagine these rules as being acceptable in their own right, never mind as 'classics' to be used in training/education?
When one finds poor examples like this, it always make me wonder whether there's other topics in the book that in my naivety I am accepting hook, line & sinker, and others readers more familiar than me would similarly find to be in error? I suppose I'll never know. So I still need to read further about the topic in case I've been misinformed; so if you're going to buy one book about business rules - then this isn't the one.

Almost half of this book has nothing to do with using Quickbooks, and the half that talks about Quickbooks instructions is shallow and almost useless. Every time something confused me when I tried to decide how to use the Quickbooks features, I looked it up in this book. Half the time there was no information, and the rest of the time the information was less helpful than the instructions that appeared on the Quickbooks screen. I ended up calling my accountant so often, he told me buy a book. When I told him I'd already bought this book, he told me to buy the other bestselling book on Quickbooks , which is the one he used. He was right.

There isn't a lot of good, practical information in this book, because the author spends too much time on non-Quickbooks information and wisecracks. However, when I had a problem, the information in this book was wrong.

My bank reconciliation didn't work, and I looked up the solution in this book. The picture of the reconciliation window the author used to explain the problem wasn't the same as the window in Quickbooks. The author's "solution" was to let QuickBooks make a change to my records - which my accountant won't accept. I finally went to a bookstore and found another book, which gave a clear explanation of the problem, how it happened, and how to fix it (it was the QuickBooks Official Guide by Ivens).

This book is not only missing important instructions for Quickbooks users, some of the instructions that are in the book are wrong.

I haven't read the book yet, but I just bought it. I read the Mr. Nelson's statement (third reveiw listing) and took him up on his offer to email him with questions. He answered very quickly and was very helpful! I figure that any author that makes himself that available, must really believe in his book. Thanks Steve, appreciate your time.

This book was a huge disappointment. The author does not appear to have any previous background on this dynamic industry. This book is not even suitable for a primer as much of Ms. Stone's analysis is not accurate. Having worked for the company, I can attest to the fact that its history is not as simple as portrayed in the book. Stone seems bent on proving that Ellison - despite his rock star ego - is the epitome of a true leader.

I really enjoyed this book. It's a business book that's actually fun to read. Larry Ellison is almost a mythic character in the high tech business world. Everyone is familiar with his company, his strataspheric success, and his fierce competition with that other successful mega-maniac Bill Gates, but the man himself remains a mystery, like Oz behind the screen. This book does a good job of taking us behind that screen to give us insight into the man's psyche.

Stone's book made me respect Ellison for what he is -- an incredibly smart businessman with the talent and drive to transform his vision and knowledge into an amazingly successful company. While I agree with Stone that I wouldn't want to work for him, I'd probably like to BE him!

Love him or hate him, Ellison can teach us a few things about business and success.

I was a big fan of Ellison's swashbuckling style, iconoclasm, functioning as a much needed and cash rich arch enemy to The Borg from the North, long history of success, but things just don't seem to be the same without Ray Lane kind of functioning as Ellison's superego. The Oracle of Oracle had experienced a great run up until Lane's departure, and companies don't flourish on the cult of a personality alone.

I dumped my Oracle stock a while back, but hope Ellison's seeming spiral into ill advised hubris isn't completely intractable. The story of Oracle and Ellison is more than compelling, and only time will tell whether Ellison's risks in Lane's absence will prove fruitful or fatal.

A final note: Mergers and acquisitions are often great for investment bankers and lawyers, but not necessarily great for shareholders and customers. The bigger the merger and/or acquisition, the bigger the potential problems as well. Seems that Oracle is biting off more than it can chew with PeopleSoft.

Don't bother buying the Resource Kit - buy this book instead. It explains the architecture and lets you know upfront what is and is not currently available in the 1.0 release of the product.

Hacks to provide functionality that should have been in the product are covered (although with strong warnings about no support from Microsoft).

If you've suddenly been handed a project involving SharePoint, buy this book! It will save you many hours of grief.

This is still the best book out there for developers looking to extend and customize SharePoint Portal Server. It provides detailed step-by-step instructions for customizing the UI and insight into the ways you should and should not use SPS. Highly recommended.

If you want to know how to install and configure the SharePoint out-of-the-box user experience, your expectations won't be met by this book. But, if you want to know the product inside and out (but especially inside!) then don't move an inch - your here!

There's no other place to get this detailed level of information - not even the resource kit! The more tedious parts come with click-by-click instructions. We are a Microsoft SharePoint ISV and have accomplished a number of significant SharePoint and Team Services implementations in both the Federal and commercial market. I wish I had this book before we started.

Yes, the book is technically challenging. It "gives away" a lot of the tips and tricks that it took several years to learn while developing knowledge-based applications over the Exchange storage system. It exposes these secrets so that just about any experienced developer can produce truly flexible, re-deployable knowledge applications and portals.

If you're afraid to skin your knees, stay in the sandbox.