Customer Reviews

Principles of Corporate Finance + Student CD + Ethics in Finance PowerWeb + Standard and Poor's (McGraw-Hill/Irwin Series in Finance, Insurance, and Real Est)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This text book has drawn howls of protest from my fellow class mates based on its impenetrable and inaccessible style. There is no step by step explanation of concepts or proper derivations - you are forced to plough on through the chapters with an increasing sense of disconnectedness from the material being taught. This is a shame since I believe the authors are leaders in their field - I suppose there is a true difference between knowing your subject and being able to convey that knowledge.
The text jumps from introductory concepts to advanced material without laying the groundwork for that leap. I would recommend Fundamentals of Corporate Finance (Ross, Westerfield and Jordan) in preference if you want to maintain your sanity and come to grips with the material.

I am sad to report that this book is an inadequate and frustrating introduction to finance. Important concepts are buried; there are no derivations; there are few clear explanations of concepts; and definitions of terms are sparse at best. The many jokes come as a welcome relief from the generally poor writing, but provide no educational value. The book is rendered even more confusing because its organization is wayward, jumping unpredictably back and forth between topics. Overall, I find this textbook to be incredibly opaque, and I constantly have to supplement my readings elsewhere. If you have had prior exposure to finance, then I suspect this textbook will be far more digestible, but if this is your first exposure to the field you may wish to try an alternate text.

This book leaves me with more questions about finance than I have answers. Who do the authors think they are writing for? It surely is not the beginner MBA student. It seems like words are expensive because they do not fully or even partially explain concepts. Finance is difficult but it should not be impossible. I should not have to read and reread to figure out what the heck they are talking about. Maybe they should serve as advisors to this text and let someone who knows how to write actually write the book. These guys may be leaders and brillant but they are poor communicators. I'm not thrilled with my professor either. Is he a cheerleader or a teacher?

Materials are not systematically presented.

Recommend Ross's Fundamentals of Corporate Finance, Corporate Finance and Modern Financial Management.

This book is not very clear in its explanations and does not have too many worked examples. Not sure why my MBA school prescribes this. I recommend reading Fundamentals of Corporate Finance Standard Edition by Stephen Ross, Randolph Westerfield.

This book was one of the worse books we had in our MBA program in University of Toronto. It is very confusing and vague. Some chapters are very short and don't cover a subject completely and like typical MBA books there is no answer to end of chapter questions. So you have to be a MBA student and rely on you professor for the answers to the end of chapter questions. There are much better books in the market for learning finance. For the whole course I had to study from other books to learn a subject.

This book was very hard to follow and does not spell things out very effectively. I had to get this book for class and I hated it. I felt like I couldn't find anything when I wanted it.

I have to agree with others that this book is a bit unwieldly. However, this book is considered a mainstay in most MBA finance programs and I've worked with many people that use it as a reference. I think the problem is that corporate finance is not an easy subject to teach and get across concisely. I have actually read many finance books on my own and found most of them unwieldly. Therefore I would still have to recommend this book if you are trying to learn corporate finance.

I thought the text was well organized and well explained, but a lot of the problems in the book required concepts that the text didn't explore. On top of that, the CD that came with the text had some serious editing problems where information in problems in the text didn't match what was provided in the CD. The notes on the CD were laced in editing errors. The book was overall pretty good, but it is frustrating when you encounter problems where the concepts weren't really laid out in the chapters.

This book is sucha collasal waste of money. The ideas presented are very basic, but the authors are rather daft and manage to confuse readers even on simple concepts. Much of the stuff any normal person with average IQ would be able to understand reading investopedia. The book is a typical MBA book - dumbed down, glossy and expensive.