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The E-business (R)evolutionBy Daniel Amor A book review by Jim Frazier First of all, if you're involved with ebusiness at the management level, you need to buy this book. Period. It is a tremendous executive overview of just about everything you need to know in order to make intelligent and informed decisions about your company's ecommerce, Web and email strategies. And if you're not a manager, but yearn for a more rounded perspective, this book will give it to you. The book starts off with a good strategic overview of ebusiness and integrating your systems. Then it takes you through the basic technologies, covers legal and marketing issues, ecommerce systems, the basics of building Web sites, XML, and an excellent discussion of security. Having no interest in Java, I skipped that section. You CAN bypass parts that are of no interest to you. Each chapter stands on its own. You can read what's interesting to you skip what's irrelevant. There are LOTS of great ideas ranging from watching Internet discussion groups for negative comments about your company, to excellent recommendations for globalizing your site. The book is almost encyclopedic in its coverage of the subject. If you use it as nothing more than a reference book to fill in the blanks in what you just read in the Wall Street Journal, it may be worth the price. If you're a marketing professional, you may find Amor's discussion of promotion and advertising to be a little basic. He is an engineer and shows a less than seasoned approach to marketing issues. But for those of you with little background on this topic, you won't be disappointed. Amazingly, for a book on technology and business, this book is very readable. Except for a couple of chapters (like the Java chapter I mention above) it wasn't too technical, and you can almost read this book for pleasure, not just business. When I read a business book, I usually take notes with page numbers so that I can refer to the book in articles and presentations that I write. I have ten pages of notes on this book. Need I say more? I do have two big complaints, however. The first is that this has to be one of the most poorly written and badly edited books I've ever read. Obviously English is a second language for Mr. Amor. I fear that it was also not the native language for the editorial staff either. The prose is clumsily written to the point where you have to scratch your head occasionally after you've read a sentence that didn't contain any verbs. There are "their/there/they're" errors, two or three line sentences with no commas, and as usual for a technology book, way too much use of the word "paradigm." In the text, Amor implies that the book was rushed to print, and it's pretty obvious. I almost wonder if the publisher got the file from the author via email, ran spell-check on it, accepted his assurance that he had someone edit it, and went to press. No self-respecting editor would have let this book go out. That said, the worst of the examples are in the early sections of the book. Once he gets into the more technical and topic-specific chapters, the problems become less annoying, but more humorous. I found myself being disappointed if I read a page and DIDN'T find an egregious error. So be patient as you stumble through the author's thoughts in the early chapters. It will get better. My second complaint, and it's a minor one, is the geographical orientation of the book. Warning! This might be considered politically incorrect - but that has never stopped me in the past. Since the author is from HP in Germany, obviously his examples and stories are generally going to be from that part of the world. For American readers, it's going to be a little disconcerting to read a book that isn't US-centric. As a simple example, all of the testimonial blurbs shown on the first page of the copy that I own are from Germany. This isn't a complaint, but I want to address a suspicion that you might have. While the book is published by HP, and Amor does mention HP products, he definitely does not push his company's technology. So don't worry about that. I again want to encourage you to read this book. If you are looking for a terrific resource to get up to speed on the world of ebusiness, you should read this one.
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