Listen to a podcast here or watch a video here of Joe discussing his textbook, the Financial Accounting course, and students to gain perspective on this text.

This book is suitable for an undergraduate or MBA level Financial Accounting course.

If authorship matters (and we believe it is everything) then this book is destined to be a classic. There are no two better authors than these. Joe Ben Hoyle is co-author of two current market-leading advanced accounting textbooks with McGraw-Hill. He and and co-author CJ Skender are nationally recognized as master teachers. Both have won numerous teaching awards, and both were recently recognized by BusinessWeek as top undergraduate professors.

The authors bring their collective teaching wisdom to bear in this book not by changing "the message"(financial accounting content), but by changing "the messenger" (the way the content is presented). The approach centers around utilizing the Socratic method, or simply put, asking and answering questions. The reason that this approach continues to be glorified after thousands of years is simple - it engages students and stresses understanding over memorization. So this text covers standard topics in a standard sequence, but does so through asking a carefully constructed series of questions along with their individual answers.

This approach has a number of unique pedagogical advantages:

1- It breaks topics down into smaller component pieces. Each question and its answer look at a specific piece of material. The student only has to deal with that one question and its answer at a time. Material is presented as a clearly established series of steps rather than as a long flowing monologue.

2- The format allows for a conversational style. Virtually all experts agree that individuals learn better through give and take than they do through one-directional lectures. The questions and answers make the entire book feel like a conversation.

3- Logical sequencing is a key ingredient to successful learning. Because students are being exposed to each new topic for the first time, they often have trouble making leaps of understanding that appear easy to a teacher (or a textbook author). The question and answer format provides an orderly method for creating an appropriate sequencing of material. Question 2 should be the logical follow up for Question 1, and so on. Students are led through each topic in the most understandable fashion.

4- A key to successful teaching is to puzzle the students, and then help them solve the puzzle; Why did this technique work?; Why is the calculation performed this way?; Who really cares about this?; A question and answer format leads to this type of educational presentation.

A final distinction of this text is its simplicity. In today's texts, each page is an eclectic assortment of educational aids: glossary, learning objectives, newspaper articles, etc. Students who only read one word and one sentence at a time are often confused by such a random arrangement. In this book, the presentation of question and answer is clean and uncluttered. Then, at the end of each question and answer, there are links for students who wish to explore further (for example, a link to 1-5 multiple-choice questions with clearly explained answers to immediately reinforce their reading).

Version 2.0 of Financial Accounting boasts unparalleled author attention. Joe rewrote all of the end-of-chapter material for every chapter, personally. He took much of that material from coursework he assigned in his own classes. In summary, he cleaned up the questions at the end of the chapters and added two and three times as many true-false questions, multiple-choice questions, and problems as in the first edition.

In addition, Joe completely revamped the solutions manual to make it clearer and easier to use.

Version 2.0 also contains completely updated real company data, current IFRS references and a new reference case for every applicable chapter.

Review the new edition today and imagine your students taking a heightened interest in and understanding of financial accounting.