To me as a student, this book is nothing more than an expensive glossary and introduction to e-commerce. You can find all of the information for free online or elsewhere at no cost.
Do not get the impression that it will teach you how to carry out e-commerce. This book is not about PHP or ASP or databases or HTML - it's about defining what e-commerce is and what it consists of. As I said, an expensive glossary.
Disappointing.
I like the book mainly because it offers the primary business concepts needed by my technical students before they enter the IT job market. My students can't take a lot of business classes, but they still need to know the business side of things. This book gets them the essentials in a one semester format.
Ecommerce is rapidly changing, so it will be tough for a book to keep up. I haven't seen the web site that accompanies the book yet. Hopefully it will be a good supplement to help stay current in a rapidly changing field. The book has a lot of web sites as examples, which can be a mixed blessing since web pages change constantly.
Teachers - the book says it has the usual instructor supplements for classroom teaching as well as online teaching, but I haven't seen them yet. I am using the stuff from the 3rd edition to prepare for my summer class - you will probably need to choose wisely as you review these supplements since they are of mixed quality. I am giving the book 4 stars instead of 5 since I can't vouch for the supplemental materials at this point.
The book offers a balanced business-technology approach to the subject of e-commerce and include a great overview of both relevant technologies and business/revenue models. The book includes important issues like legal and international concerns and even has a great little section on managing and staffing Web development projects in the last chapter.
This is the only book on e-commerce that I have seen that actually creates and uses a theory-based organizing framework (they build on Porter's work on value chains). Even though the book was clearly designed to be used in the classroom (it has problem assignments, exercises, and an extensive list of references at the end of each chapter), I think this book would be an excellent resource for a business manager that wanted to learn what all of this e-commerce stuff was all about OR for a techie that wanted to learn something about the business end of e-commerce.
The book is a very easy read and is remarkably interesting (even the chapter on security theories is pretty hard to put down... and that is some dull stuff, usually). The book includes bolded company names throughout and each of those names is included on the book's Web site as a hyperlink to the company site. This is very useful because you can see the examples that the book mentions come to life (if you can read the book while you're in front of your computer)...
I would recommend this book to any reader that wants to learn more about electronic commerce than you would find in a light overview book. This book gets into details, but in a very readable way.