Micro-economics for CS students

I recently went through the article on "Advice for Computer Science College Students", by Joel Spolsky - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html .

In that Joel says that a programmer who understands the fundamentals of business is going to be a more valuable programmer, to a business, than a programmer who doesn't. Many ideas do开发者_Python百科 make sense in code, but not in business.

I'd like to know if there are some quick reference manuals for CS students to learn micro-economics. I'd like to know the ebooks that would help one to understand the basics of it.

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Not an ebook but well worth reading if you can get your hands on it. There's a book on running a small business by one John Gilmour, who used to own a bootery. Yes, that's right, a shoe shop.

He published periodic articles in the finance section of a state-wide newspaper in Australia and ended up publishing them all as a book (called "Small Business Soldier").

He covered such good topics like:

• how to deal with the tax man and various other government officials.
• losing the chequebook near month end to keep costs down.
• various ways to save money and increase revenue from a very base level.
• stock issues and how to avoid them.
• firing your bad customers and suppliers.

And he did all this in a very humorous and engaging way which kept my interest.

Basically, it was all about taking advantage of good times and surviving bad times and this got me further in business than any of the commerce subjects I did at University.

You might also want to look into a couple of books from John Cleese (one of the Monty Python crowd) called something like "So you think you can sell" and "So you think you're in business" - same humorous engaging manner but more closely aligned to sales, management and accounting information.

I would use the former to learn about the realities of business and the latter to learn about how it should be done in an ideal world (which, of course, it isn't).

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To understand basic theory, you have a couple options. In terms of understanding how economics and business strategy interact, I found the following helpful:

• The Economics of Strategy by Besanko et al. (http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Strategy-David-Besanko/dp/0470373601/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322681916&sr=8-1)

• Competitive Solutions by McAfee (http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Solutions-Strategists-Preston-McAfee/dp/0691124035/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322681964&sr=1-2)

These books focus on how economics drives business strategy.

For basic micro theory, Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics is good. (http://www.amazon.com/Intermediate-Microeconomics-Modern-Approach-Eighth/dp/0393934241/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322682191&sr=1-1)

If you want something more technical (i.e. involving Calculus), see Nicholson's Microeconomic Theory or Jehle & Reny's Advanced Microeconomic Theory.

Given that you are in high tech, you may also enjoy Information Rules by Shapiro and Varian.