Customer Reviews

Advanced Accounting: Concepts and Practice (The Dryden Press series in accounting)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a graduate student in accounting, I've found this book to be the most difficult and the most frustrating to read amongst my collection. This book is certainly not helpful to visual learners as there is mostly very dull text explanation of the subject material. Also, the few in-chapter examples worked out are very difficult to decipher and are poorly explained, so you're left on your own to learn how to do the end of chapter problems.

I learn quickly and am good at learning from a text, but this book is horrible at explaining a topic from beginning to end. It's good at giving background on advanced accounting, but if you want to try and apply any of the concepts to real accounting situations you can pretty much forget about it. I used this in my accounting class without a problem to understand some of the concepts, but to try and use this in my current position as a senior accountant working with consolidations and foreign entities is nearly impossible. The examples given are often incomplete and leave the reader asking a lot of background questions.

I have never come across a texbook that makes consolidations easy----until now! It seems that most advanced accounting texts are written by Ph.D's to impress other Ph.D's. This one is different. It actually explains in a concise manner all important aspects of advanced accounting in a way that is easy to understand and apply. Unfortunately, it was written in 1995 and obviously doesn't contain some of the more recent exposure drafts on consolidations and derivative accounting for foreign exchange forward contracts.

This book goes on and on about minor details, sometimes repeating the same irrelevant or simple ideas over and over, and providing excruciatingly drawn-out background information that is basic business, and then when it comes to the big stuff, gives incomplete explanations and illustrations and leaves out critical pieces of information.

I often felt left to my own devices to figure out how to document certain transactions...going through the same section dozens of times and finding not even a rudimentary explanation for exactly what the section is supposed to cover.

It's hit and miss, but overall very disappointing.

I recall being particularly disappointed with its explanation of consolidations with regard to foreign subsidiaries.

This book is required for my class, so I'm not personally excited about it. Haven't started the quarter yet so I don't know how well it is written. But it looks good, not to heavy for an accounting book.