The Complete E-Commerce Book : Design, Build and Maintain a Successful Web-Based Business

Rating:
Summary: A Good Basic Introduction
Review: Back when I was first doing an e-commerce web site (you remember, that was the days when we walked three miles to school, uphill both directions) this book would have saved me days of effort. It is an introductory level book. That is to say, it will get you started, but by the time you have a working site, you will have learned a lot more than in your specialized areas than is covered here. This book provides the basic introduction. Do you want a shopping cart type application or perhaps an auction? What about peer-to-peer file sharing or perhaps a blog? This book will talk about these initial decisions that have to be made before you start thinking about the guts of implementing them. After these decisions are made you'll need more detailed books on the specific area where you are going.

The one thing I would like to see added to a new edition would be specific software recommendations, i.e. what two or three shopping cart solutions would she recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I was very disappointed with this book.

One thing that I hate about the book is that it has ads in the back. The ads are for seven other books. I expect to see ads in magazines, but when I pay for a book I don't want advertising.

More importantly, the writing is awkward and hard to understand. For example, here's how she describes relational databases:

"A relational database is a collection of 'data items' that are organized as a set of linked tables from which data can be accessed or reassembled in many different ways without need to reorganize the database tables (a table is referred to as a 'relation')."

Huh?! That description is confusing and much of it is wrong. How can data be "reassembled"? What does she mean by "without need to reorganize the database tables"? Database tables can have foreign keys or referential integrity, but they are not "linked". Each table is its own independent entity.

She continues, "The columns in all of the tables must depend upon a single key column with values that don't repeat." That's not true either. It's very common to have a table with multiple keys or no keys whatsoever.

The author explains that "SQL is a declarative language, which means that the user specifies what he or she wants and then the RDBMS query planner figures out how to get it." But that's not what "declarative language" means at all.

I tried to work my way through the poor writing and typos, but after a while I lost confidence that the information in the book was accurate and I put it down.

Rating:
Summary: horrible book and title is very misleading
Review: If you are from planet Mars, you still wouldn't find this book useful. The dumbest person I know, knows more than is in this book. There is no code. It doesn't tell you exactly how to do anything. It just blah blah's on and on about useless info. Design, Build, and Maintain a website title? It doesn't cover any of the technical side of this like the title says. Save you money and pay someone to start your online business for you. It took a whole book to tell you this????? Save your money.