E-Commerce Basics: Technology Foundations and E-Business Applications

The authors have put together a primer on explaining e-commerce. The ideal audience for this book appears to be an IT manager or perhaps a programmer. The discussion is mostly at a level above actual programming. You don't need working knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, Java, web servers or other related topics. The book delves into key ideas of organising a web service, such as what is an n-tier application. Cryptography also gets good coverage. A qualitative explanation is given of the Public Key Infrastructure and Certificate Authorities, without descending into the maths of number theory. Malware is also covered. Though, given its increasing severity, perhaps a more extensive analysis may have been warranted. Overall, the book places all these topics in the context of building and running a large e-commerce service. If you do wish to go in this direction, the book is a good start. Though you will certainly need more specialised texts later.