The book is a collection of survey articles. Many of them are top-notch and exceedingly useful. Some of the topics are a bit off-beat, and relatively unexciting to me. Some of the topics+author pairings are extremely well chosen.

I found around five to eight of the 23 chapters to be weak. The remaining are excellent surveys. The book is dated 1996 so the material is late 1995 to early 1996 vintage.

The relevant chapters from this book are required reading for all my Ph.D. students.

Akshay R. Rao and Mark E. Bergen are Associate Professors at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management; Scott Davis is principal and founder of Californian consultancy Strategic Marketing Decision. This Harvard Business Review article was published in March-April 2000.

"Price wars can create economically devastating and psychologically debilitating situations that take an extraordinary toll on an individual, a company, and industry profitability." And according to the authors most managers will be involved in a price war at some point in their career. But the authors believe that managers have an arsenal of weapons other than price cuts at their disposal. They believe that the first step in a price war is diagnosis. Or asking yourself why the price war is taking place. The authors introduce four key areas: Customer issues, company issues, competitor issues, and contributor issues. This diagnosis should provide companies with a few different options. The first option is to stop a price war before it starts or revealing your strategic intentions, using tools such as price-matching policies, everyday low pricing, and other public statements. The second option is to respond with nonprice actions. This option builds on the fact that different customer segments have different degrees of sensitivity to price and quality. The authors use price sensitivity on the Web as an example for this strategy. The third option is to use selective price options. These are mostly complex options such as multi-part pricing, quantity discounts, time-of-use pricing, bundling, etc. Common classic tactics in this option is to change customers' choice, modifying only certain prices, and the use of fighting brands. The fourth option is to fight it out. This should be used as a last resort and you should realize that this option has several long-run implications. When you choose this option, the authors recommend quick and umabigious implementation. The fifth and final option is to retreat. "On rare occasions, discretion is the better part of valor." It means giving away some market share rather than prolong a costly battle. For each of these options the authors provide examples.

The authors provide some insights into the options and their tools available to prevent a war on price. This prevention of a price war builds on the notion that price wars can often harm an entire industry, so companies should have a hard think first before they enter one. It builds on traditional strategy thinking, but also on game theory. The authors use simple business US-English.

A look at the past from the vantage point called present. That aptly describes The Insider.This semi-autobiographical work from PV Narasimha Rao manages to engage you throughout.The former Prime minister of India displays superb story telling skills combining facts with fiction with post independant India serving as a vast canvas.PV takes the reader with him to the journey into the past 50 years starting from Nizam movement in Hyderabad till the destruction of Temple/Mosque at Ayodhya.You'll get an understanding of post-independant India,more specifically the state of Andhra Pradesh where PV served as the Chief Minister.

PV should have been more upfront about the characters that he has used to reflect the real persons in Indian national Congress.He ducked various important issues that changed the face of India throughout these years.Most important of them are Emergency and Indira Gandhi's assasination.He also chose to ignore the rise of Indira Gandhi after the famous split in the Congress.

What PV has effectively done is make the reader yearn more of his work. May be the active nature of his politics restrained him to be more forthright in "The Insider". He has promised a sequel.That should be more interesting since he has retired from active politics.

In summary, a good engagaing work but could have been a lot better.

Book contains abundant pictures with full descriptions of items and history. Also contains excellent resource section for U.S. and Japan. Terrific book for anyone interested in Japanese style interior design

This book contains an encyclopaedic wealth of material on the mathematical theory of Statistics upto the beginning of the 70's, packed in its 600-odd pages. It contains material for several courses in Statistics at both undergraduate and graduate levels. In Chapter 1 it captures in a few pages the essence of matrix theory required for Statistics. The material on Linear Models and Least Squares in Chapter 4 is excellent. Chapter 8 captures succinctly in a few pages the entire theory of the multivariate normal and sampling distributions thereof using the characterisation arising from the Cramer--Wold Theorem. The other chapters too contain a phenomenal amount of material in a wide sweep of the theory of Statistics. However, it is not suitable as a text-book since the writing is terse; an instructor who already knows the subject will benefit from the book to prepare his material; students will find it difficult to read it on their own. Further, the proof-reading is somewhat shoddy and there are many typographical errors. Then it has some idiosyncracies like presenting the author's list of publications, impressive though it is. If you are a working statistician or a researcher or a teacher of Statistics, you have to have a copy of it on your desk within easy reach!

Good exercise book with precise explanation, however you should have spare time to review 1000+ of questions. CISA exam is simpler than this exercises, don't worry about it if you don't get the right answer most of the time.

Should have fun to read this book although it is quite expensive

easy to read and step-by-step explanation.. More useful and pletiful diagram than recommendation.. and comprehensive( ITU, ATM-Forum ) background... I can't escape from this book by the last page. You will need not thick and many recommendations related to signaling any more!

The Indian film industry is the most prolific film producing fraternity in the world. Yet not enough is known about what makes it tick. Here is a book that gives you in-depth interviews with significant and influential directors, actors, and screenwriters of India which show you what makes this industry survive and throb. Rafique Baghdadi is internationally known as an authority on cinema in India. His reviews are reference points for any writing on Indian cinema. His "Landmark Hindi Films" is eagerly awaited by Indian film industry watchers across the world. "Talking Films" is regarded as one of the definitive works on this subject. It is a must buy.

I read this book while I was working on a project at UPC (Spain), which talked about Digital Television. It was specially useful in topics like MPEG, where Mr. Rao explained clearly the mathematics and other techniques involved in this kind of compression. It has to be considered a reference book since it has the information to build coders, decoders, etc. Personally, I think any engineer working on topics which involve image or audio processing should own this book.

This is the book that I currently use. The book introduces you quickly to the main structure of IFC programs in great detail. The book has a tutorial style that I always look for in a book. The only weakness is that Constructor is not covered at all. Overall, I think the book's content makes up for not covering Constructor or not having a code disk.