Finance-Software

This is your typical beginner book on investments. The book is separated into 6 categories, each category having 2 chapters apiece. These categories are, The Investment Environment, Important Conceptual Tools, Investing in Common Stock, Portfolio Management, and Derivative Securities. Although, one can see that the book seems to broken down nicely in each category, the examples illustrated in this book are very sketchy, and at times hard to follow.

What makes this book so difficult to follow is that at the end of each chapter, you are given a set of review questions to practice what you learned. This is very bad if your professor assigns the book, but doesn't use it. Now, this is the catch. There are NO answers for these review questions anywhere in this book. In fact, the only way one can possibly get these study question answers is if her or she is the professor. In order to do this, you have to login to the author's page as the "educator." Of course, students who buy this book for class, will only have student access which only enables them to see what they "need" to have learned from each chapter, and access to a small pc program that solves everything for you. A nice tool, but kind of pointless if you do not know what you are doing in the first place. Oh yea, did I mention you only have a 6 month subscription to this "service." I do not want to call it a service by any means, since its useless.

In short, if you are a student, or want to get the general ideas of investment, Do NOT buy this book, since you will never know if you are applying the principles that you learned from this book properly. I had no choice but to buy this book, but if you can avoid this book, please do, and save yourself a headache or two.

Fundamentals of Investing leaves a good deal to be desired as a textbook for a first course on investments. It is too wordy, being nearly 700 pages in length (not including tables or the index), making it somewhat challenging to cover the entire book in a single college semester.

As with any book, Fundamentals of Investing has its good features and its bad features. The chapter on investment planning (chapter 3) is quite good as it gives the reader an understanding of the motivation for investing. Another good feature about the book is the treatment of the security analysis process and how the investor should approach the analysis of investments for inclusion in a portfolio.

However, the deficiencies of the book appear to outweigh its benefits. First, the authors appear to assume that the reader is already familiar with the concept of the time value of money (TVM). Since the TVM concept is vital in assessing the worth of an investment to an investor, a reader that is unfamiliar or not well versed in the TVM concept is likely not to fully understand how securities are valued. Second, many of the examples given in the book are not always of great help in assisting the reader in understanding the concepts that were presented. Finally, the problems at the end of each chapter do not seem to provide much of a challenge to the reader to apply the concepts that were covered in the chapter to reinforce what was supposed to have been learned.

On the whole, the book can be useful in introducing the reader to the investment process and in understanding the variety and value of different types of securities. But a reader who is less familiar with investing can do better than to buy this book.

Time for me to upgrade to the Seventh Edition! I used Fundamentals of Investing, Fourth Edition around 10 years ago in a college course at WCTC in Waukesha, WI. My instructor was a V.P. at a major brokerage house. It was one of the best and most rewarding college courses I ever took. We covered the entire book in one semester.

As with any book, Fundamentals of Investing will please some and not others. This book lays the foundation for investing by covering topics such as stocks, bonds, insurance, and the like along with understanding the risks of each. This book is not a "get rich quick" self help book. You will not find "trendy ways" to invest, hence the title "Fundamentals of Investing."

This book is where I learned Time Value of Money (TVM). Before I learned of TVM and investing, my retirement plan consisted of the value of my home and social security. Now I am well on my way to achieving my goal; retiring as comfortable as or better than I live now. If there is any social security when I retire it will be a bonus.

On the whole, this book (including my 4th edition) is useful even as a reference to the investment process. I use it to refresh my understanding of the variety and types of securities. Others may disagree but this is my investment bible. It has paid for itself time and time again by reminding me of the basic "Fundamentals of Investing."

You can remove a lot of risks to investing if you read and understand those investments in "Fundamentals of Investing."

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.

This is a history of the Software Industry. "Software" was coined to distinguish it from hardware; it describes the spirit that activates electronic machines. There are three sectors: software contracting, corporate software products, and mass-market software products (pp.3-8). The book covers events from around 1950 to 1995 in the USA. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the sources available. Chapter 2 tells of the origins of software writing, and its need for high-maintenance. Could errors arise from "one minor change"? Early users cooperated in sharing software. FORTRAN and COBOL became the first standard programming languages. But high costs and slipped schedules became typical. Government support for SAGE helped establish US dominance of the computer industry (p.48). The "Great Society" led to investments in non-defense projects.

Chapter 3 discusses "Programming Services". The established techniques of engineering management filtered into programming projects. Program flowcharts became institutionalized, then flushed away by the "fad for 'structured programming'" (p.69). The boom for software companies in the late 1960s reminds me of the dot-com fever in the late 1990s. All fueled from government spending (p.75, P.80). The arrival of minicomputers around 1970 allowed middling companies to own a computer. Chapter 4 tells about the change to "Software Products". Computers were more plentiful and more powerful (pp.90-91), programmers didn't keep up. Lines of code used increased 1000% every 5 years, the cost of developing quadrupled by 1965. Page 100 discusses flowcharting, whose purpose was to graphically represent a program's operations. Sort of like a condensed slide presentation of a topic. Page 102 tells of a secret machine instruction used to improve sorting speed (what was it?).

Chapter 5 tells how the software industry acquired its current shape, and gives an overview. Software products was a capital goods business. Industry specific software requires in-depth knowledge; in systems software programming skills are critical. The success of CICS can be compared to a system of roads where applications can freely travel (p.151). Chapter 6 discusses the maturing of corporate software packages, and growth through acquisition. It focuses on three large firms that became prominent in the 1990s. Some grew by acquiring smaller firms for their products (diversification). The rise of the relational database had an adverse affect on older database technologies. The use of fully integrated business application software (ERP) created new companies. Pages 182-4 overviews the successes of Computer Associates. A relational database did not require knowledge of the internal structure of the database; ever faster computers masked its relative inefficiency. Sales of SAP R/3 benefited from the "fad for business re-engineering" (p.195). Page 197 explains why SAP is more important that Microsoft.

There are strong parallels with other historical systems, such as railroads to airlines. If the database was bundled with the operating system there would be no independent vendors. European firms were able to pioneer ERP because they not not been locked into "legacy software" (p.199). The remaining chapters discuss the history of the personal computer.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog may sound like a mystifying title, but this book provides a reasonable overview of the history of the software industry. At times, given the ups and downs in the industry, it can't avoid sounding like a catalog of defunct firms and obsolete software. However, this chronology is quite useful for anyone who wants to come up to speed very quickly and very generally on the main trends in the industry. Author Martin Campbell-Kelly covers some of the industry's seminal events and the main categories of software. Vexingly or refreshingly, he takes pains to say as little about Microsoft as possible, making it clear that others have written enough on that subject. So, with that absence duly noted, we recommend this book to those who want an inside history of the software industry, from massive mainframes to little blue cartoon porcupines.

This history of the Software Industry covers personal computers in the last three chapters. The "Acknowledgments" lists his sources and references. Chapter 7 reviews the early development of microcomputers. The invention of the microprocessor in 1971 made microcomputers possible (p.201). The Apple II was the transforming event of April 1977. The fall 1979 release of VisiCalc transformed "toy computers" into a useful machine for businesses. Digital Research's CP/M allowed any application to run on any computer that used CP/M; this allowed program vendors to access a larger market. Microsoft eclipsed DR by providing DOS for the IBM PC, and its games and programming languages. PC software was usually sold by mail, then at stores. The invention of VisiCalc is credited as boosting the market for personal computers. Productivity applications drove the software industry in the early 1980s (p.215). Word processing was aimed at home computing; Word Star was the most successful. Most computer games were produced by sole authors, lasted a few months, and made little money.

Chapter 8 discusses the now mature PC industry. Why did a few companies succeed where many failed? "The Autodesk File" says: product improvements, complementary products, training networks (p.243). Technical competence does not guarantee success unless it meets user needs (p.244). The need to work with two or more applications simultaneously led to "windowing" (p.247); but this required more time and money than first estimated (p.251). Page 253 tells of the big mistake by Lotus' management in rewriting the program. A similar mistake doomed Word Star (p.255). Ashton-Tate's demise is described on page 257. These were one-product companies. Page 259 explains Microsoft's winning strategy for its Office Suite. Page 264 tells of Symantec's strategy for success.

Chapter 9 describes software used for entertainment, and looks at videogames, CD-ROM encyclopedias, and personal finance software. Arcade games replaced older pinball machines during the 1970s. Videogame consoles for the home allowed playing many games. Home computers had a keyboard and secondary storage, and could be programmed by the user. Videogames are similar to recorded music's stream of new titles, and relatively short life. The purpose of a CD-ROM with an encyclopedia was to justify the cost of a computer (p.289). Microsoft's Encarta broke into the 1993 consumer market with multimedia. This coincided with the falling price for CD-ROM drives (p.292), and lowered prices for CD-ROM software. By the early 1990s Quicken was the best selling consumer software product of all time. Its founder entered a crowded field with no track record, an untried product developed by a single programmer (p.295). It was designed to be easy to use, and continually improved.

Chapter 10 discusses the success of Silicon Valley, and the economic and physical environment that created its culture (p.303). Hardware companies tended towards success, software companies less so (p.304). The great number of computers in the US created a market for software companies. The prices for their mature products ruled out competitors. This pattern continued to the personal computer age. One effect of manpower training is to create off-shore body shops to benefit US multi-national corporations. Clustering firms in a small geographic area helps, as does Government subsidies (like the Internet). But misdirecting support can hurt rather than help (p.311). [I found Robert X. Cringely's book to be better.]

Some brief history, albeit disorganized, accompanied by rambling editorials about free beer and communism.

Peter Wayner explodes the story of the Open Source/Free Software movements into one compelling narrative. Mixing a history of the movements, from the universities where they were spawned (Berkeley, MIT, and others), the personalities, people like Richard Stallman (GNU), Eric Raymond (The Cathedral and the Bazaar), Linus Torvalds (Linux) and the lesser known but vital free programmers, with the current business climate, (the Internet, the Microsoft trial, IPOs), Wayner crafts a book that should popularize this topic to the general public. His insights to the effect of free and open software to the marketplace will give ammunition to those seeking to express their passion to code on their stodgy bosses and will keep many CEOs up at night trying to figure out how to save their precious revenue streams. Wayner also peppers his story with a little sociology, politics, and history, to make the book stand out as a critique of life in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Ultimately, he makes a strong case for his prediction of why Open Source/Free Software will topple the proprietary software houses in the near future.

I've been a professional programmer, software entrepreneur and user of free software for over 15 years. I highly recommend this book for several reasons. First, it is one of the best and most important business books I've yet read about the software industry. It presents an insightful and nuanced analysis of the economics of software creation in the Internet age and articulately explains the appeal and inevitable success of open source software. As such this is a MUST READ for anyone who manages or invests in software-based companies.

Furthermore it is a delightful read. Programmers will no doubt appreciate the inside references to things like the religious "wars" between vi and emacs. At the same time, Wayner has a gift for metaphor and human detail that bring both the concepts and the players to life, and in a way that is accessible and enjoyable for both technical and non-technical readers.

I agree with the writer who programmed Clayburg's signals into his software; the idea of entering a long position in the countertrend simply doesn't work most of the time. Other than that, the book is gramatically well written.

John Clayburg has produced a well written book that would be a valuable addition to the library of any serious trader. Although the book is directed primarily to intraday trading, his basic concepts are appropriate for all styles of trading. His method of always defining the major trend and never trading against that trend may seem fundamental, but it is a lesson that most traders (including me) have learned the hard and expensive way. The author provides a systematic approach which keeps the trader on the right side of the major trend while providing specific techniques for entry and exit. His entry methodology invloves defining exhaustion of minor pullbacks against the major trend and defining short term support and resistance levels. By requiring these support/resistance levels to be broken prior to entry, many bad trades are avoided. The book is also well illustrated with numerous example charts. If you are trading or planning to trade, you can save yourself some money by reading this book.

There are now many trading books available in the market. The quality of these books varies immensely. This whole book really only explains one trading plan- to be used in a short time frame, ie. daytrading. The four steps, in short, are descriptions of the rationale and steps used to enter an exit a market. Many other books will also offer the same. What is unusual and laudable however, is the depth of research that the author had undertaken in order to justify why his apparently logical approach may be used in the timeframe he suggests to make money. Exemplary is the pages upon pages of data on the directional day filter. Few books I know even come close to matching this degree of scholarly depth. The author himself notes that few people will trade using his indicators the same way. What this book allows, when combined with one's own research, however, is sensible and rationale debate of the merits or not of any particular approach, tested objectively, in a way few other books offer. For example, is the 'personality of markets' approach, a form of curve fitting optimization? Is using a chart based support and resistance technique for entry really the best way? Most successful traders will already have their own set trading plan- and probably have their own ' four step' process. However, one may have reservations or even disagree completely with the author's approach to trading, and yet cannot fail to be impressed by the outstanding quality of this work.

As an undergrad taking his first finance class, I have have found this book to be quite useful. The concepts are explained in simplified, less-complicated ways and make reading each chapter less frustrating than perhaps some others (compared to some of the econ texts that I have had to use!).

It is well-written, concise, and employs some very straightforward, easy-to-follow graphs/diagrams. Also, both the formulas and the exercises at the end of each chapter are quite useful.

The only reason that I did not give it a 5-star rating is because some of the chapters did not use enough "real-world examples" or hypothetical situations in some of the more challenging lessons. This might better aid those students who are new to finance or simply need another angle to better grasp the idea.

Delivery was terrific. I received the book 6 days after I ordered it and it's brand new!

This book is very easy to follow and serves as a good reference for more advanced finance classes.