economics-software

Not a good book unless you also have Chriss's book of the same title - too many references to it. Software is interesting.

For the reader well-versed in Mathematica and in economic theory, this book gives a fairly good overview of how Mathematica can be used to study mathematical economics and finance. It is also assumed in the articles in the book that the reader has a strong background in mathematics. Since the book was published in 1993, Mathematica has considerably expanded, with many new features that make some of the accompanying code in the book somewhat dated, but the notebooks can still be used beneficially.In addition, economic theory is currently making more use of symbolic programming, and financial analysis has exploded as an area which is now making heavy use of high-performance computing. Although Mathematica cannot compete from a performance standpoint with the needs of financial engineering, it still has an advantage from a didactic standpoint. I did not read all of the articles in the book, so my comments will be limited to the ones that I did.

The article on "Mathematica and Diffusions" is an overview of how to use Mathematica to do stochastic calculus. The Ito calculus is reviewed briefly, and the authors begin with constructing a Weiner process. The Mathematica package they employ and on the disk accompanying the book is not discussed in detail, but is merely used to simulate realizations of the process. Readers who want a more in-depth view will have to go over the code themselves. The authors use the package to generate realizations of Weiner processes that are correlated with each other, and show this correlation via Mathematica graphics. The Black-Scholes formula is derived using the standard self-financing trading strategy and ignoring transaction costs and dividends. The algebraic manipulations are done with Mathematica, and this obscures (a little) the underlying concepts behind the derivation of this important formula. Since data structures in Mathematica are essentially lists, the authors outline the construction of the data structure that could be used to represent a diffusion, namely a list consisting of five terms: the diffusion, Weiner process name, expression for the drift and dispersion, and the initial value. For the reader familiar with OO-programming, accessor functions are used to extract the components of this data structure. This is a nice move by the authors, for it is an example of how Mathematica can be used to emulate OO-programming.

The article "Itovsn3: Doing Stochastic Calculus with Mathematica" is an overview of how to use the Itovsn3 package that is on the disk to implement Ito calculus. It is assumed that the reader has a background in stochastic calculus, since the author does not give a review. However, semimartingales, so important to those working in financial engineering, are discussed and their statistical behavior described using Mathematica. The Ito formula is presented as a semimartingale-type decomposition for smooth function of Brownian motion and the author shows using Mathematica plots how the higher order terms in the second-order Taylor expansion vanish asymptotically. This article is not merely Mathematica code for Ito calculus, for the author gives an example of how to use the package in a hedging problem.

The article "Option Valuation" is a more detailed overview of how to use Mathematica in the context of the Black-Scholes model to perform options valuation and risk management. Heavy use is made of the graphics capability of Mathematica to illustrate how option values change as a function of stock price and time of expiration. The author also shows how Mathematica can be used as a OO-language to treat options as self-contained objects with accessor functions. He does however state that Mathematica does not live up to the OO toolkits available elsewhere, contrary to my experience. He closes the article with a consideration of how to use Mathematica to value options that can be exercised before expiry, the binomial model playing the central role in the discussion. It is here in particular that the performance of Mathematica is readily felt. The numerical number-crunching needed to do the calculations in these types of models cannot be done in Mathematica efficiently and profitably.

The article "Time Series Models and Mathematica" gives a general treatment on how Mathematica can be used to study ARIMA models for time series. Mathematica is used more interactively than the other articles and the visualization obtained is quite nice in giving the reader insight into such concepts as the moving average and the spectral density function. The author shows how to estimate the spectral density function and why periodogram techniques fall short in this estimation. I would have liked to see other techniques for studying time series discussed, such as neural networks and hidden Markov models, but the author does do a fairly good job with the ARIMA models.

I am implementer for used automatic data entry system for computer system

I was very disappointed in this book because I looked forward to my finance class in college. But this book was poorly put together - one short paragraph would talk about carry forward and back but nothing was elaborated on the subject - it would just go right into the equation. I heavily depended on the professor's lecture and not once referred to the book when studying for the exam. However, I did use the book to make sure I was using the correct terminology for the exam.

Olson's text lays down the fundamental bricks of a solid IT project manager. This book covers a wide variety of topics -- everything from financial analysis (cost/benefit, NPV, etc.) to the approaches of the systems development life cycle.

Although I'm sure Olson has received many deserved acclaims for his writings in this field, I think this text leaves a little to be desired. It is a very impersonal read, oftentimes forgetting that superb personnel skills are essential to the up-and-coming project manager. It is a very thick, dense text, and although it is not even 300 pages, you sometimes feel that you're sifting through a phonebook to find the scarce relevant information. At times, it can even be quite repetitive, which is a true feat for such a thin book.

I got the impression that Olson had very little experience in the area of IT project management, often referring to outside (3rd party) studies and hypothetical examples to back up his main ideas. The text could have used a good deal more real-world examples and insight from professionals in this line of work -- not just other professors who study it.

Overall, it isn't a great book, but you can do worse I suppose. If I weren't required to read this for a class, I would have definitely picked up a different IT project management book by an author in the actual industry. This is a good starting point for a book in this field, but I will definitely want to supplement it with a more encompassing book by an accredited author from the IT workplace.

This book does not contain any useful information for software test professionals. It is little more than a whitepaper that takes a ten-thousand foot view of web testing and why it should be done, with lightweight examples.

However, this book does highlight activities and milestones that are essential to deploying web-based solutuions. From this point of view it does have value for managers and PMs who are responsible for making a business case for web-based projects.

For professional testers I recommend either Testing Applications on the Web by Hung Quoc Nguyen or Client Server Testing on the Desktop and Web by Daniel J. Mosley.

For project sponsors and project managers this book would nicely augment Web Project Management: Delivering Successful Commercial Web Sites by Ashley Friedlein.

While experimenting with different textbooks for my Microeconomics classes, I decided to try the O'Sullivan and Sheffrin text. That experiment lasted two semesters.

Portions of the textbook are written at levels which are too low for college/university students, while other portions expect students to go beyond the scope of the material covered in the text. For example, in the chapter on demand and supply, surpluses and shortages are never referred to as such. Instead, they are only referred to as 'excess supply' and 'excess demand'. Too simplistic of a definition is also used for opportunity cost.

At the same time, additional problems inserted near the end of each chapter (not the chapter problems themselves), require students to apply the theory in a way that isn't taught in the textbook. Any student who has been required to complete these questions, on the basis of the textbook alone, may have experienced a lot of frustration from attempting these problems.

In addition, the textbook presents a detailed theory of taxicab licensing, yet doesn't completely explain all of the needed theory (short-run and long-run) for the market structures (pure competition, monopoly, etc.) The explanation of taxicab licensing is poor, for this level of student.

For any professor considering adopting this textbook, the testbank offers some very good questions. However, apparently some of the questions have been changed, perhaps from an earlier edition, but the answers haven't been. Overall, there were more errors in this testbank than in others I've used.

To anyone required to purchase this textbook for a course, I would recommend purchasing or borrowing other textbooks to supplement this text. If someone wants to learn Microeconomic theory on their own, there are better books available.

If you are looking for a real history of Microsoft or the rising of Silicon Valley (this was my case), then this is not the book you are looking for. Instead, this book contains some articles of Ted Lewis (written between 1993-1998) that shows the evolution of the hi-tech industry.

Each article looks beyond the possibilities (in the time it was written) and the possible effects (let's say predictions) that in most of the cases were right and leaded to the actual present we are living. It was a very interesting reading although it was not the kind of tales that I was looking for.

The book on the whole is good. It is very general and useful for novice and little experienced people.

I would like to see more enhancements to this book. e.g Details of Collateral Management systems etc.

I will keep it short and will write a detailed review later

I like the concept of this CD-ROM, but this title could use improvements.
When I installed the CD, I found that it has 340 total questions to "Test Your Aptitude." It has Questionaires on Personality, Mindstyle, Motivation, and Emotional Intelligence. It also has an Ability Test, which is mostly a timed math test. Here is the breakdown on the number of test questions:

Personality (80 Questions, untimed)
Mindstyle (88 Questions, untimed)
Motivation (84 Questions, untimed)
Emotional Intelligence (48 Questions, untimed)
Ability Test (a timed, 40 Question math test)

Improvements needed: A way to print out the test results in a report format. Also, the British bias could be minimized within the math problems for an international audience. The loud timer should be silent when taking the Ability (Math) Test. Lastly, the CD-ROM's installation method could be simplified, as I had some difficulty initially installing the software.