The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Accounting Course, 4th Ed (McGraw-Hill 36-hour Courses) [Paperback]

I own a small business and I needed to get a basic understaning of accounting. This book ended up being the perfect choice The book is very well written and explains accounting in plain english. It gives you what you need to know in order to study accounting in a format that you can very easily understand. The included study plans are extremely helpful as well as the self tests that go along with each chapter. There are not too many books out there that are this informative. I especially enjoyed the author's style of writing. Normally this can be a tedious topic to read about, but not this book.It's very practical in introducing you to real life accounting.

I bought this book due to all the glowing reviews here, and now that I have it, I'm thorougly confused--both by the book and by the glowing reviews. In 1999, I took two college accounting courses and made an A in each of them. Now, eleven years later, I am enrolled in school to complete my accounting degree. I bought this book to brush up on my skills before my next accounting class starts in January. I sure wish I had just saved my money on this, and gone ahead and bought a textbook. This book does not explain things well at all. I just completed chapter 4, and I feel like I know less about accounting than I did when I started. Even worse, I have already found several errors, some mathematical, and some are probably typos (amounts put in the wrong columns, etc.). How do I know if I'm doing the problems right, if the answer key is full or errors?

In short, I don't recommend this book for either students or business people. There has to be something that is easier to understand and has fewer errors out there.

I am a college student whose area of study is Digital Forensic Investigations, and one of the requirements for the degree is a course in Forensic Accounting, however for whatever reason there is not a prerequisite for this course. I opted to take Principles of Accounting to understand the basics and make it my own prerequisite. Since I have a month and a half off school, I figured I would get a head start and start to familiarize myself with the basic principles so that I wouldn't be totally lost in my class. In this previous semester I had taken Investigating White Collar Crime, and easily understood the basics of Fraud Auditing such as shell accounts, check fraud, money laundering, embezzlement and analyzing this using the Benford-Curve Analysis on statement sheets.

I picked up this book thinking that I would get a great basic understanding for my class next semester. My heart sank when I read "The course assumes the reader to have a layman's acquaintance with such terms as accounts receivable and common stock, but it also assumes zero knowledge of the accounting process at the outset." I bought the book a week ago and I'm still trying to understand Chapter 1: The Balance Sheet. The most frustrating part of this chapter was the fact that it gave a formula for finding "net worth" then 3 pages later it states to disregard that term, and replace it with "stockholders' equity or capital stock." Yet, there is no definition of these terms and aren't even discussed. In the examples of the balance sheet (and there's 5 different layout forms to select from) there's no explanation of why a certain value is entered in column 1 and some of the others are in column 2, and sometimes column 3. It would have been nice to have that explanation. There are tests at the end of each chapter, which is really nice to see, and thought that would help me. In the test problem however there was mention of dividends, mortgage notes, uncollectible funds, unexpired insurance, inventory without ANY mention of these terms or how to include them into a statement sheet, let alone what category they should be included. I feel that if it's on the test then it should be discussed in the chapter.

If this is a 36 Hour course then I have failed. I am now into Night 4 at about 2 hours each session to try to grasp just the first chapter. A lot of these reviews are from business professionals who have given this book great reviews and say it's a "must have" and how much it helped them. I am writing this review from a perspective of a brand new student to this field. Be warned: if you get this book then this is not your only resource to understand this material. I had to use search engines to research basic terminology that I felt should have been included in a glossary, and had to "cheat" by looking at the solution to even begin to understand how to layout the statement sheet because of the added factors on the test question that was not discussed in the forms.

This course may be 36-Hours but that's 36-Hours of studying just the book. Unfortunately that time frame does not include the usage of additional research and information sources.