A Brief Guide to Business Classics is a book written by James M. Russell, first published in 2018. It contains summaries of many popular business books, ranging from books about marketing and investment to leadership and self-help. From ancient books such as The Art of War and I Ching, to the more modern ones such as How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Idea in You. The writer compresses the content of those business books into 4-5 page summary and adds his own opinions as to which books are worth investing your time in and which ones are just time wasters or even harmful for business practicioners.

This is a quite helpful book for people that are interested in business but don't know where they should start. Because of the oversaturation of books in this area, it's super useful to have a book like this as a compass to point you in the generally right directions and to avoid wasting your money and time on the bad yet popular business books.

Although the book is obviously biased by the writer's own mostly-conservative opinions, overall it still provides a balanced judgement and always gives credit where it dues. And even though the writer spoils basically everything those books have to offer, I don't think it's a bad thing given how easily one can be manipulated by the title of these kind of books.

Bottom line is read this book if you want to avoid buying bad business books.