With the Fourth 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 have always maintained that the subject of corporate finance can be viewed as the working 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 first three editions, as well as from our other text, Fundamentals of Corporate Finance (now in its 6th edition), many of you agree.

By design, this book is not encyclopedic. As the table of contents indicates, we have a total of 18 chapters. Chapter length is about 30 pages, so the text is aimed squarely at a single-term course, and most of the book can be realistically covered in a typical semester or quarter. Writing a book for a one-term course necessarily means some picking and choosing, with regard to both topics and depth of coverage. Throughout, we strike a balance by introducing and covering the essentials (there’s that word again!) while leaving some more specialized topics to follow-up courses.

The other things we have always stressed, and have continued to improve with this edition, are readability and pedagogy. Essentials is written in a relaxed, conversational style that invites the students to join in the learning process rather than being a passive information absorber. We have found that this approach dramatically increases students’ willingness to read and learn on their own. Between larger and larger class sizes and the ever-growing demands on faculty time, we think this is an essential (!) feature for a text in an introductory course.

Throughout the development of this book, we have continued to take a hard look at what is truly relevant and useful. In doing so, we have worked to downplay purely theoretical issues and minimize the use of extensive and elaborate calculations to illustrate points that are either intuitively obvious or of limited practical use. As a result of this process, three basic themes emerge as our central focus in writing Essentials of Corporate Finance: