This is the worst written text book I have ever had to purchase for a class and I would strongly encourage any professors out there looking for a text book to explore other options and any students to drop any class that requires this book.

The book is written as endless walls of text and the author writes in a very confusing manner making the book 3 times as long as it needs to be. The author wastes line after line of text yammering on about pointless stuff like how we will be covering more of this topic in chapters 5, 7 and 9 respectively. He also uses extensive citations of the works of others to the point that by the time you get back to the main point you forgot what he was trying to say to begin with. Many of his citations are from the 1960's too which makes the book feel really out of date.

If you need this class to graduate and can't drop it and take one with a different text then I strongly suggest buying the Kindle edition since you can search a kindle book and copy and paste out of it. A great trick for learning with this book is to copy and paste a page into Word and then delete all of the superfluous BS on that page and then read the 3 important sentences that are left.

In case anyone doesn't believe me about this book, please see the half page I have copied and pasted here. The rest of the book is no better. There are 590 pages just like this in this book. Really think about dropping the class that would have you read this. I am on Amazon right now looking for a different PM book so I can actually learn this topic. I learned little from this book because real information was just too diluted and I was halfway through the class before I started editing it in Word for myself.

This chapter initiates our discussions of Time, Quality, and Risk Management, PMBOK
knowledge areas 3, 5, and 8, respectively. Time management is an extensive topic which
is further discussed in Chapters 8, 10, and 11. Similarly, risk will be discussed further in
Chapters 7 and 8, and quality will be discussed again in Chapter 12.
In the Reader's Digest (March 1998, p. 49) Peter Drucker is quoted on planning: "Plans
are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work." To make such a
transformation possible is no easy task. Inadequate planning is a cliché in project management.
Occasionally, articles appear in project management periodicals attesting to the value of good
planning. Project managers pay little attention. PMs say, or are told, that planning "takes too
much time," "customers don't know what they want," "if we commit we will be held accountable," and a number of similar weak excuses (Bigelow, 1998, p. 15). Tom Peters, well-known
seeker of business excellence, was quoted in the Cincinnati Post: "Businesses [believe] a lot of
dumb things. . . . The more time you spend planning, the less time you'll need to spend on implementation. Almost never the case! Ready. Fire. Aim. That's the approach taken by businesses I
most respect." We strongly disagree and, as we will report below (and in Chapter 13), there is a
great deal of research supporting the view that careful planning is solidly associated with project
success--and none, to our knowledge, supporting the opposite position. On the other hand,
sensible planners do not kill the plan with overanalysis. This leads to the well-known "paralysis
by analysis." In an excellent article, Langley (1995) fi nds a path inbetween the two extremes.
Thus far, we have dealt with initiating a project. Now we are ready to begin the process of
planning the work of the project in such a way that it may be translated into the "hard work"
that actually leads to the successful completion of the project. There are several reasons why
we must use considerable care when planning projects. The primary purpose of planning, of
course, is to establish a set of directions in suffi cient detail to tell the project team exactly what
must be done, when it must be done, what resources will be required to produce the deliverables of the project successfully, and when each resource will be needed.
As we noted in Chapter 1, the deliverables (or scope, or specifi cations, or objectives) of
a project are more than mere descriptions of the goods and/or services we promise to deliver
to the client at a quality level that will meet client expectations. The scope of a project also
includes the time and cost required to complete the project to the client's satisfaction. The plan

Meredith, Jack R. (2011-12-01). Project Management: A Managerial Approach, 8th Edition (Page 221). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

Run far and fast. This text book makes so many references to other resources you have to wonder if you wouldn't be better off reading them instead of the textbook. They even shamelessly reference other textbooks by the lead author. Every other page has a reference of PMI's PMBOK.

This textbook does an appalling job of explaining every concept it claims to cover. Section 8.2 "Network Techniques: PERT (ADM) and CPM (PDM)" is especially horrible and does the reader a disservice by making it absurdly more complicated then it should be. I ended up having to use YouTube to try to figure it out the concepts.

An example how bad the book is try looking up scope in the book. Reading the 1st chapter you would know it's on pg. 11, but in the Chapter 1 glossary it's not listed. Then looking at book index listing for Scope it directs you to Project, goals and deliverables. So you look up Project notice that there is no goals and deliverables heading, but there are two headings one deliverables and one for goals. I save you the effort its listed under goals. Why is it such a process to find something that is fundamental to understanding the subject matter?

I'm not sure who the authors wrote this book for since most people will find it useless. The authors might have written it for other academics, but they would just use PMI PMBOK instead. Every chapter is disjointed with random articles that do little to reinforce the actual material. Honestly, Wiley should be embarrassed to be associated with this train wreck.

TL;DR If they assign you this book for a class, just drop the class, an then consider changing schools since they don't care if you actually learn anything. Total waste of time.

I have not read the entire book yet, but I purchased this textbook for my Environmental Project Management Class. The seller (Charlotte's supply) said "International Edition with exact same content." I just found out the hard way that this is not 100% accurate. I was able to access the US textbook using a Kindle trial and I carefully went over Chapter 6. This is what I found:

227 (Int) Project Management in Practice: Timetable Scheduling and Operational Plan Generation for London Underground
227 (US) Project Management in Practice: Shanghai Unlucky with Passengers

243 (Int) Project Management in Practice: Disaster Project Planning in Iceland
243 (US) Project Management in Practice: Using Agile to Integrate Two Gas Pipeline Systems

268-274 (Int) Case: Caprico
268-276 (US) Case: Heublein: Project Management and Control System (your book)

Clearly, some of the examples and case studies are different in the International Student Version. All the other pages are the same as far as I can tell.