Fundamentals of Investments focuses on students as investment managers, giving them information to act on by placing theory and research in the proper context. The text offers strong, consistent pedagogy, including a balanced, unified treatment of the four main types of financial stocks, bonds, options, and futures. Topics are organized in a way that makes them easy to apply—whether to a portfolio simulation or to real life—and supported with hands-on activities.
This is a good elementary text in investments, suitable for a beginning finance/economics student. I'd say that anyone who's taken a first college course in economics could successfully use this text to become more literate in investments. That said, if you've taken more than that, you'll probably find this text much too basic. It's light on the math, and that's really a bad thing most times, since you can usually say things so much simpler in math. The book is also rather inadequate once you start to move into derivatives and MBS. It also doesn't have any coverage of the kinds of products that have been in the news so much lately.
Fundamentals of Investments w/student CD + Stock-Trak + Powerweb+Crabb's Finance and Investments Using The Wall Street Journal Author: Charles J. Corrado, Bradford D Jordan, Charles Corrado, Bradford Jordan
This book taught me a lot about investing as did the college class that I took that required this as the text. I enjoyed the historical information and the terminology the most. If you are wanting to start investing, this might be just the detailed book to give you the confidence to do so.