For courses in Financial and Managerial Accounting.
Expanding on proven success with Horngren's financial and managerial accounting Horngren’s Financial and Managerial Accounting, The Financial Chapters present the core content and principles of accounting in a fresh format designed to help today’s learners succeed. As teachers first, the author team knows the importance of delivering a reader experience free of obstacles. Their pedagogy and content use leading methods in teaching readers critical foundational topics and concentrates on improving individual results. With this in mind, the 6th Edition continues to focus on readability and comprehension and takes this a step further in the managerial chapters by employing a new theme to help readers see how managerial accounting is used as a tool to help all business people make decisions. By providing more meaningful learning tools, this title helps readers clear hurdles, like never before. Also available with MyLab Accounting MyLab™ Accounting is an online homework, tutorial, and assessment program designed to work with this text to engage students and improve results. Within its structured environment, students practice what they learn, test their understanding, and pursue a personalized study plan that helps them better absorb course material and understand difficult concepts.
You are purchasing a standalone product; MyLab Accounting does not come packaged with this content. Students, if interested in purchasing this title with MyLab Accounting, ask your instructor for the correct package ISBN and Course ID. Instructors, contact your Pearson representative for more information. If you would like to purchase both the physical text and MyLab Accounting, search 0134674588 / 9780134674582 Horngren's Financial & Managerial Accounting, The Financial Chapters Plus MyLab Accounting with Pearson eText -- Access Card Package, 6/e Package consists
This was my first semester back in school in about a decade. On the balance, schooling hasn’t changed all that much but it has changed. What is hard to sus out, is how much has schooling changed and how much have I changed.
Horngren’s Financial & Managerial Accounting is every bit as riveting a read as you might expect. That is needlessly insulting. The textbook does an exceptional job making the technical exercise of financial accounting accessible to students. It is readable if not entirely enjoyable. The textbook itself deserves more than the 2 stars I’ve awarded it. The thing is, one part of schooling that has changed is more and more of it is done online and the downside to this is one of the things that has not changed is how good a job content makers are doing making interactive, online content.
To being with, this text was intended to be accessed online. I purchased a hardcopy of the text for an upcharge. While a e-document would have been perfectly functional 83% of the time, there were at least two big drawbacks to the online edition of the text. Firstly, it loaded slowly. Page turns were far from instantaneous and flipping back and forth was a lossy enough process that switching between text and examples, was prohibitive. Just pushing ahead one page at a time made the reading experience broken and uneven. Secondly, while doing homework, much of which was online, the assignment window and text windows were impediments to one another. All this was easily resolved with a hardcopy of the text but it presages the lack of foresight on the part of the content developers.
The online experience was fairly technically robust with two major exceptions. Firstly, the publisher underestimated server loads for the first week of class and the servers crashed making signing up impossible. During this time, we could neither work on homework nor read ahead, assuming the hardcopy upgrade had not been purchased. Secondly, midsemester half the class was deleted off the roles locking us out of the homework. The publisher blamed the instructor and the instructor blamed the publisher. I do not care who was at fault. I am both their customer. Delivering a satisfying educational experience is their job. On that occasion, they failed.
The homework interface was maddening. Entering homework involved logging onto the class blackboard page, clicking a link to the publisher’s course page, then clicking through to a homework assignment which would open in a new window which would spontaneously resize and relocate itself during the loading process. Once loaded the assignment window could be resized and moved but not before.
Inside assignments, successive windows would have to be opened to facilitate doing the assignment. A mock income statement and balance sheet were common secondary windows we would need to keep opened for reference. The interface would not let us drag those windows outside the assignment window. This meant that the only way we could accommodate the assignment was to maximize the homework assignment just to provide real estate for the secondary windows. A real pain given that this precluded using the online text or the native calculator on the computer.
The assignments also failed to resolve the tension between explaining enough to ensure that question could be answered and not explaining so much as to give the answer away. For example, on some questions, individual line items would have to be populated and submitted for evaluation. Diagnosing wrong answers was easy in these cases. For other questions, entire pages of fields would be populated and submitted and if there were any wrong answers, the error message rarely gave enough detail to know where the error had been made. Playing guess the error is one of my least favorite games. I sold a 1991 GMC Sierra because of this game.
I could never prove this to be the case, but I think the software rubric for each assignment started at the top of the assignment and popped an error message as soon as an error was found. As a result, if multiple errors were made, what little feedback was provided, seemed to only focus on the first issue. To stop error checking when the first error was located was never a safe bet.
On the whole, I decreased alcohol consumption this semester. I had something to do that required my faculties to be unimpaired. An appreciable proportion of what I did drink this semester could be attributed these course materials. That is why I had to argue myself out of a 1 star rating.
Have to say, the I followed this textbook very well while taking my intro to accounting class. Though the concepts were easy to grasp the book explained the usage of these concepts with resepct to ethical and decision making really well. I like the format how they formed a fictionalised company and went through the course using that, as well as took data from actual companies and explained the company performance with the industry averages.
It' was a good textbook. I had my frustration with it here and there. The text does provide various examples that were useful. However, some were a bit confusing. It did its deed, I guess... I passed my class. It's a textbook, what else can I say!