 2008-09-29 - Foundations of Finance: The Logic and Practice of Financial Management
Seller was very cooperative when i needed to return the book, book was exactly as described, fast delivery
 2008-03-04 - nice use of Web Works to attract readers' mindshare
Assuming no prior knowledge of finance, the text affords you an extensive education in the subject. The authors span a wide gamut of ideas. As in discussing the time value of money. Nowadays, this involves extensive simulations via spreadsheets, and the book shows using Excel how you can gainfully tweak parameters to see differing results. The ready availability of spreadsheets and calculators is put to good use throughout the book. Burdensome calculations are delegated to those devices, leaving you to deal with the higher level issues.
There is a huge number of exercises in each chapter. Clearly aimed at the undergrad environment. There is also a "Web Works" section ending the chapters. Here, the authors refer you to numerous websites germane to the chapter. The book avoids a reference section in each chapter, where this would give a list of texts or journal papers. Instead, the Web Works takes its place. A good call. Today's readers are far more likely to actually utilise it and peruse the links. Simply because it is a lot easier to type in those URLs (yes, even manually type them into a browser) than it is to go to a library and hunt down a bunch of texts.
2008-02-13 - A fine textbook for introductory finance courses
I am a junior finance faculty. After instructing economics courses for several years it was the first time I'd be teaching finance. I've been using this book for almost 2 months now. It is clear and very well organized.
The first 4 chapters elaborates on how to read the financial statements of a firm. The chapters that follow discuss the valuation of financial securities. The appendix is very concise since it focuses on how to use a financial calculator, which is a must for a financial manager. The remaining chapters of the book focus on various topics like investment and capital budgeting decisions as well as dividend policy of a firm.
I highly recommend this book as a primary text for undergraduate finance courses.
 2005-04-27 - difficult read
it seems like the writers of this text's intentions were to confuse the hell out of finance majors and intimidate them so that they would stay away from the finance 'game'.
I'm sure the book is chockfull of information, but using it for the two past semesters, i havent learned as much as i wanted to. Perhaps in the next edition they will be able to make the text easier to understand and read.
Finance can be a very intimidating subject, and the writers of this book seemed to have no intention of making the topic easy to understand.
2000-12-20 - Review of Foundations of Finance by Arthur J. Keown
This is an excellent text. I've read it thoroughly. The material , as presented, assumes a robust course in accounting at the college level. This text is for a student desiring a complete rendition in basic finance topics and techniques. The text is replete with many examples and challenging problems of various complexities. The presentation is easy to read. The book is directed to students perhaps majoring in economics or finance. It is not a purely descriptive rendition of finance. Aconsiderable amount of so called "numbers crunching" is involved in reviewing this text. As such, the book serves the analytic student optimally. The text is devoid of the most complicated analytics inherent in "quantitatively oriented texts". There is a good appendix on the use of financial calculators ,as well as, present value calculations and other useful knowledge supplemental to the study of finance. This book would be most useful to students planning their careers as financial analysts, corporate planners or private entrepreneurs.
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