The Marketing Gurus

Good Books: (via Emergic) The Marketing Gurus by Chris Murray is a collection of summaries of some of the best marketing books. It’s a good concept; one can get a flavor of the best recent ideas in marketing.

Here is a review from Publishers Weekly (via Amazon):
As the editor of Soundview Executive Book Summaries, which distills business books into 5,000-word recaps, Murray offers 17 such summaries of marketing books published in the last 15 years. It's arguably a narrow range for the best "of all time" even with big names like Regis McKenna and Sergio Zyman on board. Each book summary begins with a quick summation, often making redundant the introductions written especially for the collection. And though the condensed versions manage to extract the key ideas from each text, some authors fare better than others. Faith Popcorn's unique voice survives compression, for example, much better than Seth Godin's does. The selected books are sequenced to suggest a broader argument that runs from connecting with customers to marketing in the 21st century, but the actual connections between the various works are largely unstated. Unless you're completely new to marketing research, chances are you've come across at least one of these books already, but Soundview's summaries are a good introduction for those with no background.

This is what the book description says:
Since 1978, Soundview Executive Book Summaries has offered its subscribers condensed versions of the best business books published each year. Soundview’s summaries have won it acclaim as the definitive selection service for sophisticated business book readers.

For the first time ever, Soundview is bringing together summaries of seventeen essential marketing classics in a single volume. The Marketing Gurus distills thousands of pages into fewer than three hundred, making it ideal for busy professionals, students, and anyone curious about how marketing has evolved.

I think it's an excellent introduction for beginners so that they are able to revisit and distill some of the recent marketing ideas.