internet commerce

After being unimpressed with some of the stale CIW material
available, I was pleasantly surprised with the CIW E-Commerce
Bible.

The book is well suited to self-study, it treats the material
in depth, and yet weaves in exercises and labs to keep you
interested. The labs give you a reasonably "hands-on" feel
for the material. You're expected to have a Windows 2000
Professional or Windows 98 PC on the net for the labs.

The book comes with a Boson practice exam and a CD
with various packages. My only gripe is that the three were
not as well integrated as I would have liked. The practice
exams weren't great, but after taking and passing the CIW
test, I'd have to say they are as good as the real thing.
It's important to learn the CIW exam way of thinking, which does
not necessarily match the real world.

The packages on the CD did not match what the book expected.
For example, it's not necessary to have Winzip to unzip the
E-business software on the CD, but the book believes it is.
The Apache source code package on the CD won't install,
but you can download it from apache.org. The errata sheet atThe book did the job for me. After a read-through, the labs,
and the practice exams, I passed with 88%.

This book did a great job of presenting the material covered on the exam, and was key to my passing the test.

The hardest part of the exam was what had frustrated me about the book, confusing use of terminology. I felt that a lot of the practice test questions were overly confusing and not relevant to knowing the material.

But upon taking the exam, I found that they were true to the CIW format, which is also confusing to an extreme. The book guided me around what I knew was really true, to get the test questions correct according to CIW point of view.

More than worth the price.

First of all let me congratulate you for your efforts in becoming an Certified E-Commerce professional, before writting this review I thought about this book a lot, I have to tell you that I read it from cover to cover and here are my thoughts: This book is extremely long, it talks about issues that you will not get on the exam nor they will be applied in real life, the test engine to my surprise had many, many errors, they were questions that will contradict themselves or sometimes you will find 2 correct answers when the test engine was only asking for one, futhermore, some questions had the wrong answer or were asked with insufficient information, bottom line it made it more confusing. It would mixed terms like EDI, SET and SSL.

Did I pass? yes, some questions in the test were addressed in the book, I also used online examcrams and free tests. You can pass the test with this book, but I think there room for improvement. Unfortunately, I cannot recommed this book, the most important chapter Security was left almost at the end, the explanation for symmetric and asymmetric encryption were very brief and doesn't explain it in a way you can understand it easily, also one of the key subjects for e-commerce today is security, which the book left for the end (when you are tired and your concentration is not at its peak) this makes it a lot more difficult. I wouldn't rely on the test engine at all, rather I will look for a more subject comprehensive and to-the-point text. I hope this comment might help in your search for an e-commerce text book and good luck!