Electronic commerce is a multidisciplinary field that includes technical areas, such as networking and telecommunications, security, and storage and retrieval of multimedia; business areas, such as marketing, procurement and purchasing, billing and payment, and supply chain management; and legal aspects, such as information privacy, intellectual property, taxation, and contractual and legal settlements.

This book attempts to give a comprehensive yet concise discussion of the current state of the art; predict the near future; and cover the challenges of and interactions among the technical, business, and legal aspects of electronic commerce. It is designed to help businesspeople and managers involved in electronic commerce initiatives gain insight into the technical, business, and legal issues. It contains some technical material, but is primarily descriptive of current policies, practices, and resources. Readers who want to understand the technical issues will not be satisfied with this book, but managers who want to determine what is happening in the field will find it useful.

The discussion of each area (such as business applications) begins with a description, then gives case studies to illustrate current practices. A number of interesting statistics are sprinkled through the text; they have been carefully researched and are current as of the publication date.

The coverage includes business models; industrial applications; electronic catalogs and digital currency; intranets and extranets; security; technical issues, such as telecommunications, data warehousing, storage, and markup languages; intellectual property; taxation; and regulatory frameworks.

The book comes with a CD-ROM containing free evaluation copies of Net.Commerce and VisualAge for Java. These are particularly valuable to people who are between the managerial and technical areas and who would like to get hands-on experience with the technology.