Customer Reviews

Financial Management: Theory & Practice (with Thomson ONE - Business School Edition 1-Year Printed Access Card)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I had to purchase this book for my MBA Fin Mgmt I class last semester. I actually purchased it from the bookstore. I didn't have a finance background. I really liked the way the authors made the subject easy to understand and comprehend. It gives you plenty of examples. The answers and calculations are given for the self-test questions. This class was taken all online. When I initially had taken this class on campus, I had to drop it because I wasn't understanding the concepts. After taking an Accounting course, I felt I was better preprared for this course a second time around. This book is written for the novice and advanced student.

There are a lot of things I liked about this book. For starters, it is written pretty coherently, and generally does not get too wordy. With the topic it is covering this is a feat in and of itself. The color schemes they use throughout the book to separate different examples, figures, etc further makes the book accessible.

The problems for each chapter are separated into categories for easy, intermediate, and difficult and are labeled by topic as well. This is very useful for studying if you want to brush up on a specific topic or difficulty. The back of the book provides answers to all quantitative questions, although it doesn't show you how to work out any of them.

What I didn't really like was that it was sometime difficult to find out how to work certain problems at the end of each chapter. Fairly often you will find the method to solve a problem embedded/hidden within a paragraph rather than highlighted separately. This generally does not apply to the main equations, but it can still make doing homework tedious with all the searching. Also, with the exception of the simpler chapters (Time Value of Money, and Exchange Rates) where there are numerous examples, most other chapters use one example that is either stretched out across the chapter if the problem is in depth or there will simply be one basic example. This can make it difficult to figure out how to solve any types of variations of the problem you may be required to do.

All in all, a very solid book that makes this difficult course very manageable (assuming you have a decent professor).

This is a very well written book, very good and thorough explanation of material. I would have given it 5 stars, except for one major issue:

There are several typos in problems, where a minus sign was replaced with a 2. So, 215% should actually read -15% in some places. Also, there is at least one formula where a set of parenthesis are missing in the chapter, but do show up in the appendix formulas. This is not the BIG issue.

The issue is that the publisher feels that only professors should have access to the errata sheet. If you go to the southwestern cengage website, the errata sheet is locked as an instructor resource. That, in my opinion, is ridiculous!

This was our primary textbook for a recent MBA class in Managerial Finance. It was a pleasure to use because of the clear and logical organization of material. The author(s) are obviously experts in the field. When experts write textbooks I notice that one of their problems is distinguishing the dosage for topics that need to be parceled out. A poorly edited textbook may contain too many topics and/or too much detail. The danger, in short, is information overload. A poorly edited book will tend to jumble this information so that the student will be hard-pressed to identify the 20% that is essential versus the 80% that is not.

This was not the case here. Corporate finance abounds with numerous concepts so a subject matter expert will face that problem mentioned above. To the editorial team's credit, this did not happen.

It's a keeper. It will have a place in my library as a useful reference book.

This is one of the better pieces of literature out there on managerial finance. It posseses a very walk-through/hands-on approach in regards to the exercises involved.

This is one of the recommended textbook for the Financial Management course at GWU. The book is very well written, structured and a must read textbook to understand finance. I will be keeping this book for the future reference. The professor who was assigned to this course didn't do a good job but going through this textbook was more then sufficient to understand the financial concepts. The book had a lot of examples and exercises to understand the concepts like Present Value, Cash Flow and Cost of financing was very well explained.

This book is simply amazing, very easy to follow and learn. It explains basic concepts, and has some useful material - in the book as well as online - that will help you. I frankly didn't even need the study guide; I thought the book by itself was great for me. The authors have taken a lot of trouble with detailing and giving examples, for someone new to finance to pick up on. There are chapters on financial statements, time value of money, bonds, risk, stocks valuation, financial forecasting, capital costs & budgeting, cash flow estimation, financial planning, corporate valuation, IPO's, working capital management, and a whole lot more (don't let the size of the book scare you!). If there is something you didn't understand, you can always use the one-year access card (one per book) to their online resources, and download the excel spreadsheets for each chapter. There are also 4 web chapters for more information. Online, they have explained how they work out questions in the book. The examples are very realistic, outlining actual companies and incidents that have occurred in the US. This edition (12th) has more end-of-chapter problems than the previous editions.

I have experience with accounting, but haven't really done much since 6 years with it. So this book really helped me get back my basics. The Finance class that I took in the summer was a real breeze after this (many thanks to Professor Haddad too, ofcourse). And everyone knows how fast stuff is completed in the Summer! I definitely recommend buying this book. For people with prior experience in Finance, you could even buy something more advanced to go along with it.

And thank you Amazon, for the immediate shipment. I had a test the very next week of starting. I hadn't bought the text book, till it was prescribed in the first class. So I opted for the one-day shipping. The book was well wrapped and in excellent condition. It was totally worth it.

Overall, you guys deserve all 5 stars!

I bought this from Amazon through a student. It was a bargain since the front portion of the hard-cover was broken, as if I care about the outer body.

Pros:
Explained in detail.
Need to have a workbook if you did not have a single corporate finance class in your Bachelor's. This is true for most of INTERNATIONAL Students.
like the format of the chapters, with questions at the end.
Thomson One, makes one's life easy.

Cons:
This book is NOT meant for 8 WEEKS of MBA Program. One needs to devote more time and energy.
GO FOR THIS ONE: Analysis for Financial Management with S&P bind-in card (McGraw-Hill/Irwin Series in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate)
Therefore, my professor assigned the chapters which were there for my Finance Course.
Some of the end-of-chapter answers are locked for professor use, which complicates things when I had to solve case-studies.

Overall, a good and in-depth book for people who love the subject and want to devote time to it. But DO NOT rush through this book as it won't be of any help. Take your time reading each chapter and understanding concepts.

Good Luck and Do Well!

This purchase was to help me refresh and sharpen my skills from days gone by as I re-enter the job market. I intentionally purchased a USED book knowing a newer edition was available AND another one in the works. I wanted it as a refresher and reference book and a primer IF I opted to take a course at a later date.

I hit the jackpot! My book was NEW with 1 year access to THOMSON ONE...Thank you NYC Goodwill. The book itself is very helpful, easy to understand when you have basic financial knowledge and the formulas are do-able without too much additional help. IF you have dedication and regimentation you can do this independently. HOWEVER, I do better when in a classroom when other student's questions and discussion trigger more ideas or ways to internalize the material.

The errata sheet information is still only accessible to instructors. Boo, hiss...IF I paid FULL PRICE for this book I'd expect the ERRATA sheets and a gift card to compensate me for my trouble :)

excellent book , very thorough treatment of finance. New edition came out so I ended up keeping this one for my collection because resale was minimal. Financial CD with Thompson is also a plus