Customer Reviews

21st Century Essential Guide to Federal Contracting and Acquisition - Doing Business with the Government, Selling Products and Services, Vendor and ... reference Sources (Four CD-ROM Superset)

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Since no one has ever provide feedback for this CD-ROM collection, allow me to be the first. To date, I've been VERY happy with the vast majority of purchases I've made from Amazon.com, but "21st Century Essential Guide to Federal Contracting and Acquisition" is the WORST purchase I have ever made (hands down). First, the title is complete nonesense... it is not a guide at all. As proof, you might scroll up the page a bit and look at the product details section for this product. It says it's "139420 pages". The reason is the entire 4-set of CD-ROMs is little more than screen shots of government web sites. You can just as easily visit the government web site yourself and get current information. The CDs are a collection of pdf files... nothing more. You have a plain vanilla "content.pdf" file for each CD that tells you what the other umpteen million PDF files are. Classic examples of "contents" are "mil_af_arnold.pdf, Air Force Arnold Engineering Development Center 3,885 pages". The reason there's 3,885 pages is its someones query of every single contracting document in the Arnold AFB archive, which spans 3,885 pages. THis is NOT information about "doing business with the Government" or "Selling Products and Services" to the government" as the title clearly states. Look closely at the image if the CD cover. The bullet statements say, "Full Information on over 100 agencies"... visit their respective web sites and click on their "about us" link... you get better information. It also says, "Current Vendor SOlicitations"... i.e. current when they took the screen shot and spanned it across 139,420 pages". The last bullet says "Easy-to-use Reference Sources"... I hold a Master's Degree and pride myself on having a slight capacity for abstract thought. Trust me when I say this product is NOT "Easy-to-use". It's not worth your time to look at the CD contents, much less the $2.49 for shipping. Suffice it to say, you will blow $34 on a garbage product. Thank goodness Amazon.com has a 30-day return policy... I'll be sending this back first thing tomorrow morning. By the way, I bought "Federal Contracting Made Easy" by Scott A. Stanberry. That book is jam packed with the types of pertainent information you might expect from these CD's. My recommendation is to buy Stanberry's book and leave these CD's alone (Ye be warned!)

Well, I thought I'd purchase this CD collection in hopes of learning much more about contracting... Problem is, most of the data on these CD's are way outdated (2003), so more than likely when you click on a link in the pdf files you'll come up with a dead link. quite frustrating. Another issue that bothered me was that the data DOES (as the previous reviewer mentioned) is simply provide screen shots to government websites. Um, WHY the hell would you want to pay for outdated info when you can visit the sites directly and get correct info...

Anyhow, my advice matches the previous reviewers...AVOID this purchase. Do the research yourself.