Analyst's Cookbook, Volume 2, Now Available!

The Analyst's Cookbook, Volume 2, is out right now(!) and can be downloaded from Amazon.com to your Kindle or, if you don't have a Kindle, to one of the free Kindle readers for PC, iPhone, etc.

We went with a Kindle edition of the Cookbook this time around for all the reasons anyone goes to digital publishing -- it is less expensive for you to buy (only $4.99) and easier for us to manage than paper books.

For those of you familiar with the first Cookbook, thanks for your support ... and for waiting so long!  Your loyalty has made The Analyst's Cookbook the best selling book in MCIIS' inventory (it is now in its third printing!).

For those of you not familiar with the first volume of The Analyst's Cookbook (still available in hardcopy here), it is a series of short articles that outline the basics of a variety of different analytic techniques.  Each chapter was written by a different analyst and addresses one specific method or technique, provides a short description, a how-to, and a sense of the pros and cons of the method.  The second volume follows the same pattern.

What really makes the chapters interesting, though, is the experience each  individual analyst had when they tried to apply the method to a particular problem.  In the past, these method/problem match-ups make for some fascinating reading (like when one analyst applied the business methodology of benchmarking to European terrorist groups).  The current collection is no exception in this regard.

The real exception in this volume is that, in the past, the Cookbook was a venue to show off graduate student writing, this volume shows off graduate student editing as well.  It was put together almost entirely by the editor for the MCIIS Press, Nicole Pillar.

Finally, while we had many good suggestions for improving the format of the Cookbook over the years since Volume 1 was published, in the end, we decided to stick with the less formal, "cookbook", approach of Volume 1.  The goal for us is to capture the experience of using a particular analytic method on a real problem, to give the reader a sense of how these methods work.  The purpose is not to provide a definitive evaluation of one approach vs. another.  It is a starting place for thinking about analytic methods, not the end point.

I hope you enjoy the new Cookbook!

To purchase The Analyst's Cookbook, Volume 2:  Go here!
To download free Kindle Reader software:  Go here!