Taxes Books

About 1 1/2 weeks after I purchased the book, I received an email from the seller stating that the book is out of stock and he will refund me.
I had to drop my class b/c of this and I will never order a school textbook on Amazon again.

The book in and of itself is great. It is not the correct book for school. It does not come with turbo tax and RIA checkpoint cd's. You will need each of these student versions too complete your assignments. Thompson publishing offers the full version for about the same amount of money.

I have to purchase this book for class and am a bit reluctant after reading the reviews. It seems as though the last reviewer knows or works for Hoffman. I am paying over $150 for a book and I therefore want up-to-date, well organized and well written information.

The delivery of the book was fast, the book was in perfect conditions, BUT it did not include the CD (turbo tax softare) so just pay attention when ordering a book to make sure it comes with all the necessary.

But overall it was a good purchase.

This is an excellent book to learn taxation from. I used West taxation books before going on to a career at a big 4 accounting firm!
As far as the previous reviewer, who is obsessed with out of date charts and tax forms....she/he doesn't really understand taxation. Tax codes change year in and out. When these books are published they go with the latest possible information.
Besides, if your goal is simply to learn the basics of preparing taxes, why is it so necessary to have all the current years tax code info? Especially when the tax code doesn't "usually" change a whole lot from year to year.
Anyways, I have checked out other tax textbooks, and this is the one I'd recommend (being someone with SOME experience in this field)

Frankly, I'm embarassed for the authors. I have the second edition, and it is rife with errors. It just illustrates what a PhD is worth these days. I held out hope that the enclosed CD would have a spreadsheet of value (as it implies in the text) but all that is included is the book in PDF format. Thanks guys, that's helpful! Your next book should be titled "How to lie on the cover about the contents".
I just don't know at whom they are targeting this book. Too basic for anyone in finance with a semester of accounting under his/her belt, maybe it's for kids in high school in Junior Achievement? People running Kool Aide stands?

I think we all know the market -- their students who are hosed into buying it. Click another link to get away from this book as fast as you can, so my suffering is for a purpose.

This is a good book which contains financial formulas and many examples of business analysis. The chapter on spreedsheets is badly outdated. This detracts from the book because business analysis is now all about spreadsheets. The short chapter on outdated financial programs detracts from the book. Their are other, better, books now available.

To be fair, the book covers a very complete collect of business analysis precedures and still is a good reference.

This book is useful for looking up not just formulas but valuation methodologies in a hurry. However most of the techniques, though illustrated well, do not go very deep. This book is probably good for beginners in finance. Experienced readers may be served better by other publications. All in all, I found this text useful as a quick and easy "boiled down" reference guide for models, formulas and valuation techniques.

This book is practically useless for anybody who actually needs to do financial analysis and forecasting at work. 90% of us use spreadsheets for financial analysis and forecasting, and we end up working with complex spreadsheets which tie everything from complex sales forecasts to income statements to balance sheets to cash flow projections. I am still looking for an appropriate book and/or spreadsheet add-ons that will allow me to do this. I have been searching in vain for such a program and/or book. Does anybody know?

The section on spreadsheet is terribly outdated - obsolete even. It's pretty much like a basic reference for financial modelling but does not really provide the step by step approach to the topic. Sorry but I don't think you will find useful tips on financial forecasting here.

All this book does is briefly (and I mean briefly) go over tax laws in each country. The entire information could have been reproduced on a chart and not a large book - the book could have been useful if it was comprised of any analysis.

This book is very thin on information and of low quality, although the book gives a list of every tax haven I knew of and some I didn't.The amount of information on them is appalling the pages are mostly white space, and photos are non exsistent. The page on panama and Central America had only a link to a web site, while most others had such brief information it was not worth reading some of the pages.
The book looks like it is compiled of copy and pasting of the internet and brief knowledge by the author anyone can find more information about these tax havens on the internet than this book provides.
This book is definitely not worth the money due to the lack information provided on some of these tax havens.

This book is like a compendium of online information. A bit expensive for content provided. Don't expect more than a cursory overview of topic.

As I am moving to Bahrain, this was the first chapter read from the book.

When I saw that the Author had translated "GCC" as "Golf Corporation Council" I calmly closed the book, placed the book back in its original container and promptly returned the book to Amazon.

Although they do have a Golf Course in Bahrain, at Riffa, the correct translation for "GCC" is "Gulf Cooperation Council".

I cannot recommend any reading that would make such an ominous error.

I was blown away by "Tax Avoidance a Practical Guide for Uk Residents", the authors other title and decided to try this book "The Ultimate Guide to Offshore Tax Havens". The first thing I noticed about this book was its size. This is a big book, letter sized and almost 400 pages long. It sets out to achieve a seemingly impossible task, which is to list and comment on all tax havens on the planet. Whilst I can't be sure if it was successful at achieving this objective, I definitely know that it has covered 99.9% of these tax havens. Many of the havens I have never heard of and talking to my colleagues who specialise in taxation for some of these havens, I found that the information was accurate and up to date. They had never heard of many of the tax havens either, and all the havens they knew (even the secret and little known ones) were all listed. This is an excellent reference book on Tax havens. Highly recommended.

Having worked for H & R Block as a tax preparer, I have purchased this book every year mostly as a reference book. One motivation was the ...coupon in the back that I always sold to one of our customers thus reducing my overall cost of the book.

Having purchased other reference manuals in the past, I found H & R Block's book quite superior to others and pretty much in line with many of the courses that I took from them during the off-season. Due to the fact that this year's edition was very late in publication, I had to look for a suitable substitute to it. I found "Taxes for Dummies" by Tyson and Silverman better written and organized. For the price, I would recommend the later for the same price and written more towards the layperson understanding of tax preparation.

I have went for the past 6 years to H & R Block to have my taxes done and now it's time to learn something for myself.

While the root concepts explored in this book are somewhat relevant, the tone is bland and the info is quite out of date. The copyright is 2002 but the text was obviously written between 1991-92. There in no mention of the MLAT treaty which Switzerland has signed since this was published. Keep looking.

Like Adam Starchild's book, "Swiss Money Secrets", this book does not mention any disadvantages or drawbacks of the subject - there are only advantages. Second of all, most of the information is outdated. Althought the book was published in 2002, nearly all the information came from 1992 or 1993. Falkayn is still talking about the "new" Clinton administration and is still describing the poor economy in the US - remember this is the early 90's.

He tells the reader how bad the American system is by how much debt the US has, how poor the quality of education is, the amount of poverty, their broken health care system, their illiteracy rate, etc. Faklayn then uses this to persuade the reader to invest in Switzerland. He describes the advantages of different Swiss investments such as annuities, bonds, and trusts, but does not really describe how to get involved in those investments. I am left as clueless about Swiss investments before reading this book as well as after reading the book.

I received the 2006 edition of the text while expecting the more current 2007 edition. Using to answer questions that I have regarding preparation of Trust tax returns and worry that the material is not up to date.

So a bit disappointed.

This book is a compilation of generaly available information and boatloads of case law.

My problem is that most people that buy airplanes likely know the difference between a LLC and a Corp. This book offers no new information in that regard. The case histories are likely of little use unless you are an attorney yourself.

Most disappointing is that it offers no direction into why one might want to use an LLC vs. corp, it simply tells you what they both are. I was looking for some examples that might apply to my own situation with advice on what course might be most beneficial to me.

Instead, I found that the book gave lots of information (most of which I already know) but no opinion or advice on what to do with any of it ...

This might be more considered a reference and is not very educational.

This was my 3rd crunchtime. First two were pretty helpful, but this one wasn't very good. Supplements tend to be hit or miss. This one was defiantly a miss. Unfortunately, 'basic' federal income tax is a little more complicated then this simple book can explain.

I found this book confusing. I understand the subject matter is complex, but the topic was complicated by a rambling style, lack of specific examples and too many quotes from the tax code. I admit I made it through only two chapters -- then I decided I needed to look for another book to help prepare for an overseas assignment. The book needs tighter editing to eliminate repetition, a Frequently Asked Questions section and realitic scenarios.

Never buy an income tax study guid that old, esp for $45+. The lecture itself is reasonably thorough and author's voice was acceptable, but half the information was outrageously out of date. Having said that, I used it to catch up on income tax stuff in preparation for a corporate tax class, and that worked out okay.