| This book is aimed primarily at the accountant or financial analyst who is engaged in consulting work—such as business appraisal, financial planning, and management consulting. The consulting area is the most rapidly growing area of accounting practice, and financial professionals in this area can benefit significantly from the increase in information available on the Internet.
As in the first edition, the sites included in this book are the result of years of collective Internet research, and we are sharing the sites we consider the cream of the crop. By learning and bookmarking these selected sites, you will be off to a great start with your research projects. In addition, as can be expected, there has been some fallout on the Internet. Some excellent sites simply lost their funding, some were acquired and changed missions, and those with less-valuable content folded. It appears that the strong sites just keep getting stronger.
In the first edition of this book, Eva began Chapter 1 with the sentence, “I have yet to meet an Internet user who did not have a horror story about the difficulty of finding information on the Internet.” Well, two years later, we can still make this exact same statement. Yet despite its continued growth, the Internet has gotten a little easier to search. We just need to change our thinking about how to search the Internet. And we need to stop relying on search engines and directories and realize their limitations. Sure we still have to use them—a lot! But we also need to think about portals, the “invisible Web,” and fee-based services. |