I solicit and receive questions from readers, and try to answer as many as I can (usually in this space). Without a doubt, the question I receive most often reads like this: "I''m new to commerce and I''d like to know everything I can. Can you please send me what I need or give me the URLs of the sites that have the information?" I''m usually tempted to respond with sarcasm and ask how long the writer is planning to spend reading, but since discretion is the better part of valor, I generally delete the message thinking that no serious answer would be adequate, even if I had the time and inclination to compose one. Until today!
I came across a book that sounded like just what I was looking for to solve a thorny technical problem I was having related to going global for a column I wanted to write. It turns out it wasn''t, but it was a serendipitous encounter, none the less. This book,E-commerce Success: Building a Global Business Architecture, by Jerry Cashin, is the closest thing I''ve found to an e-commerce textbook. In fact, if I were teaching a university class on e-commerce, I''d certainly assign this book as the textbook.
This book covers all the basics of e-commerce from EDI to XML, from HTML to cookies, from firewalls to protocols. For a Web veteran or an e-commerce veteran, a lot will be review, but for someone who wants to get up to speed quickly and be (or at least sound) knowledgeable instantly, this is just the ticket. I''d go so far as to call this the Acing the Technical Interview of E-commerce.
As an author myself, one of the things I found most remarkable about this book was how the author managed to get so much information into so little space - my books tend to run at least 50% longer than this. Any chapter could have been a book, but the author managed to pull out the most necessary details of each component of each technology, protocol, or business system discussed, to arrive at a concise, yet specific, explanation of everything that goes into e-commerce on the business and technology side.
This book is nothing short of a brilliant achievement: 194 pages packed with useful information about e-commerce. The price is a bit weighty, at $290, but think of this book as the equivalent of a college course on e-commerce -- without the final exam.
Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com
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