26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five books or one ?, January 1, 2008
This review is from: Foundations of ITIL V3 (Paperback)
ITIL v3 is defined in 5 new volumes, whereas the summary from Van Haren is squeezed into a single 320 page text.
Of course, you are not going to get the level of detail that you'd have if you purchase all 5 books, but if you want someone to have picked out the "best bits" then consider getting this book.
Perhaps the best attribute for the book is that it strips away a lot of the superfluous text that surround some of the new concepts. That in itself is a worthwhile reason to consider getting it. I would have liked to have seen more original diagrams, most of the pictures are taken directly from the original ITIL v3 volumes.
There is a full 30 page glossary at the back of the book that is based on the official ITIL v3 Glossary.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good outline of 5 ITIL books. ITIL=best practices in IT., August 20, 2009
This review is from: Foundations of ITIL V3 (Paperback)
This book is basically an outline of 5 ITIL books which are approximately 1200 pages total. Those 5 ITIL books, in turn, are an amalgation of 30 other IT related books on the best IT practices. You will find a LOT of highly useful information condensed into these 350 pages.
ITIL is a collection of best IT practices gathered over the last 30 years. It started in England and is now gaining worldwide acceptance. I am ITIL V3 Expert certified.
If your IT organization needs to improve its processes, create more value to the customers, more closely align business with IT, and fundamentally shift how the IT functions then your organization needs to adopt ITIL, which allows an IT organization to quickly close the IT capability gap by implementing the highly proven ITIL best practices, procedures, processes, and organizations. Unlike many IT management books which tends to provide generalities, ITIL is full of specific concepts, procedures, and processes.
This book is geared towards those who are studying the exam for the ITIL v3 Foundation Certification, which is the introductory ITIL certificate that comprehensively covers the basics of ITIL. Almost all the questions in the ITIL v3 Foundation exams are covered in this book. This book also has a GREAT glossary of ITIL terminology at the end of the book.
Because this book is essentially an outline of ITIL concepts, it can be a rather dry read. It will not entertain you but it will certainly enlighten you.
Moreover, because ITIL covers practically all aspects of IT from so many different sources, many of its concepts are not entirely coherent. Indeed, you will find many nuggets of golden ideas which seem disparate from the rest.
If you want to dig into ITIL further or get the much coveted ITIL v3 Expert certification, then I also recommend the 5 ITIL books sold on Amazon for around $500. This book, however, should be sufficient for most of the IT staff. I highly recommend ITIL V3 Expert certification for IT managers and ITIL implementers (IT project managers Business Relationship Managers etc).
There are two ways to improve this book:
1)This book is rather expensive for a softcover. But ITSM has to pay a lot of licensing fees to plethora of books.
2)There are no questions and answers which help the reader to absorb ITIL concepts and to analytically think about ITIL.
I highly recommend this book for those who want to get a good overview and introduction to ITIL as well as those who are studying for the ITIL v3 Foundation exam.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Awful - nearly unreadable., January 28, 2009
This review is from: Foundations of ITIL V3 (Paperback)
There are probably a few interesting pieces of information in this book. I have a hard time recognizing them because on the whole it's very poorly written and difficult to read. New ideas (often denoted by the author as essential or very important) are introduced in one sentence and then not explained until many pages, sections or even chapters later. The alphabet soup of acronyms is mind numbing and nearly impossible to follow. The author will jump around between completely unrelated topics and ideas from paragraph to paragraph. There are many sequences of words ending with a period that aren't even sentences - some are truly jibberish. I imagine much of the incoherence is due to a poor translation from Dutch (?) to English. For those who read English, stay far away from this book. [...]
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