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Rating: 
Summary: Extremely Frusterating
Review: I bought this book to better understand Financial Accounting. This book is loaded with errors. The end of chapter problems do not balance correctly. I had a CPA do the same problems, and he came up with the exact same totals as me!Another annoying thing to point out is that the book only gives answers to a small select random of problems. Of course they are the easier ones. I would love to get answers/explanations on the incorrect ones. I have written emails, and none have been responded. I am not suprised...
Rating:
Summary: A worthless text book...
Review: I purchased this book because its the prescribe text book. The treatment of the content is average. What annoys me is there are little or no answers to the exercises. I later learnt that Prentice Hall supplies the solution manual to the instructors, but they dont make it available to students....huh?? The authors come out with editions every year. I compared the 4th and 5th edition. Very little content changed, but they have smartly changed few numbers here and there in the exercises, forcing students to buy their latest edition. In short...this book is just a sucking machine....Worthless for $125. I dont know if the instructors get a big cut in prescribing this worthless text book...
Rating: 
Summary: Good Intro to Financial Accounting but many Drawbacks
Review: The book "Financial Accounting" gives a very good overview of the technique of financial accounting, but falls short on the analysis port.
The good: The book starts with the basics and builds up on the covered material. I did like the writing style and the book is easy to read. The basic concepts (are there really concepts in financial accounting?) are carefully introduced step by step, illustrated with simple examples and
backed up by extracts from real financial reports. Every chapter contains one or more mid-chapter and end-of-chapter summary problems (with answers) and an extensive set of exercises for each chapter.
The bad: There are several aspects of this text I didn't like too much. Although the book covers the basics, it is often kept too simple. While this is ideal for the first learning experience, a lot of real life problems are left uncovered. You will get an overview, but your far from being an accountant after the lecture of this book.
The financial statements presented in the book do not follow a common pattern. There are a gazillion different cash flow examples and none look alike (ok, maybe to an accountant, but certainly not to me). Following the style and purpose of the book, more care should have been taken in structuring the statements.
While I liked the extensive set of exercises, I was annoyed that no solutions are provided. A solution manual is available to teachers, but this contains a lot of errors.
The section on analyzing financial reports is way too brief and should probably omitted completely. There are better texts covering this issue in depth.
And the ugly: This thing is way too expensive. The binding is rather cheap, my copy started to fall apart after 2 month (or did I just have to learn harder than the average Joe?).
The CD provided with the book is neither bad nor good. Just useless. Excel files with the data for all exercises would have been far better than the provided material.
Overall, the book gives a good introduction to financial accounting, but there are too many issues to make it a really recommendable choice.
Rating:
Summary: Worst textbook I've used..
Review: This textbook is really bad. Not very informative at all comparing it to other financial accounting books. It gives very broad descriptions and definitions that make it feel more like a grammar school book than a college-level. I was very unhappy that my professor assigned my class with this book. If you do not need to buy it, please don't, it's horrible.
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