Preface to Second Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

Four years is a long time in the world of computers and the second edition of the book (a) reflects the changes that has happened in this field and (b) incorporates the feedback provided by three batches of students who have used this book. Thankfully most comments have been good but nevertheless this edition incorporates quite a few new things.

First, 2008, when the first edition of this book was published, was the year when the iPhone was launched and since then the world of smart-phones and the mobile internet has exploded through the human mindscape. The technology and the implications of the same has been described in a new chapter.

Second, the concept of installing and implementing complex business solutions on the web has become commonplace so there is a new chapter on how to practically implement a solution in the cloud.

Finally, data warehousing is an important concept that managers should be aware and this too has been included as new chapter.

What has been dropped is the introduction to object oriented programming since many students felt that as managers it would be unlikely that they would be directly involved with any activity in this area.

Another significant change is the increase in the number of tutorials from two to four and their migration from the printed textbook to dynamic web based presentations. Since these are based on technologies that change very often we felt that printing them on paper would reduce the flexibility of making changes. The two appendices with the two detailed tutorials have now been replaced with a single appendix that has the URLs pointing to the web pages that have the tutorials.

With these changes, we hope that the book will be more useful to our students.

Prithwis Mukerjee, PhD.

June 2012.

Kharagpur, India.

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