With the eleventh edition of Essentials of Corporate Finance, we have continued to refine our focus on our target audience, which is the undergraduate student taking a core course in business or corporate finance. This can be a tough course to teach. One reason is that the class is usually required of all business students, so it is not uncommon for a majority of the students to be nonfinance majors. In fact, this may be the only finance course many of them will ever have. With this in mind, our goal in Essentials is to convey the most important concepts and principles at a level that is approachable for the widest possible audience.
To achieve our goal, we have worked to distill the subject down to its bare essentials (hence, the name of this book), while retaining a decidedly modern approach to finance. We always have maintained that the subject of corporate finance can be viewed as the workings of a few very powerful intuitions. We also think that understanding the “why” is just as important, if not more so, than understanding the “how”—especially in an introductory course. Based on the gratifying market feedback we have received from our previous editions, as well as from our other text, Fundamentals of Corporate Finance (nowin its thirteenth edition), many of you agree.