This handbook, now in its third edition, is encyclopedic in nature with articles (chapters) covering all aspects of information systems and technology. This edition greatly expands the knowledge base and topics of computer and information sciences and is presented in a two-volume set. Indeed, this is an ambitious project, containing an impressive 72 chapters, divided into nine parts. (The pagination is numbered per chapter so the table of contents states that each chapter starts with page one of a given chapter.) Each chapter has a meaningful list of references, and a number of chapters have a specific glossary provided.

A number of the chapters cover fundamental topics in the modern era, while the others investigate advanced concepts and applications. Chapters 2 and 4 discuss the history and development of information technology, and chapter 67 adds to this discussion an organizational structure perspective. Chapters 9 and 11 tune and optimize databases with data models described in chapter 8. Concurrency control and distributed database systems are in chapters 12 and 13, with multimedia databases in chapter 14 and data security in chapter 53.

Big data is explored in chapter 20 and data mining with knowledge discovery is presented in chapter 19; cloud computing is covered in chapter 48. This is useful for chapter 22 on designing scientific research. Financial computing is explained in chapter 64 (accounting) and chapter 71 (investments). Software engineering is reviewed in chapters 28 and 32, with the latter concentrating on usability. Later in the book is performance evaluation and assessment (chapter 63). Finally, chapter 46 describes social media, and digital forensics is explained in chapter 56.

Some historical information and defined perspectives will help the reader to fully appreciate what the editors and the researchers are trying to accomplish. The well-developed computing curricula reported by Shackelford et al. [1] categorizes five different computing fields, three concentrating on computational aspects (computer engineering, computer science, and software engineering) and two focusing on the organization of information (information systems and information technology). Computer engineering differs from the other four because it requires extensive knowledge of computer hardware and architecture. The preface of this book explains that this handbook only explores the software-based systems from computational (volume 1) and information (volume 2) perspectives and, as such, computer engineering is not investigated in this book; however, the editors hope to present that material in the next edition.

The editors then divide the chapters into nine parts based on the model curriculum for information systems by Topi et al. [2]. That report establishes seven core topics: foundations, information management, information strategies and management, systems analysis, information technology infrastructure, project management, and enterprise architectures. The latter two are explicit chapters in this book: project management is discussed in chapter 61 and enterprise architectures in chapter 25. The other five cores are the basis for seven of the nine parts of this text. Information strategies and management, and data and information management span two parts each, while the other five are each incorporated in a single part with a related title.

The editors accomplished the goal they set out to achieve: to produce a compendium of articles that would serve experts, researchers, and students pursuing information and computational technologies alike.