Essentials of Accounting for Governmental and Not-for-Profit Organizations by John Engstrom, John H. Engstrom, Paul A. Copley (2007, Paperback)

The book is very informative and contains all of the intro-level data you need to learn about governmental and not-for-profit accounting. However it is very dry and is if anything overly concise. The facts are crammed into the book like a summary, with almost nothing added. There is a website maintained by the publisher that has sample tests for each chapter and they will literally ask multiple questions about a single sentence in a 30-page chapter; I felt like I would have had to memorize almost every line in the book to be able to get a high score on these tests. In the preface and other introductory text the authors state they are trying to make this a brief treatment of the subject, but I felt it was a little over-summarized and over-condensed, to the point where it made it difficult to get as much out of the book as you could have.

Also, I found several instances of typos in the problems. It looked like they tried to switch the numbers around so students couldn't cheat by getting answers from previous years to current edition problems, only sometimes they didn't fully switch out the mumbers. So for insance in one problem, they will start saying there is a bond outstanding with $8 million in principle at 6% interest, and there is an accrued interest at the end of the year of $240,000 ($8 million x 6% x half a year) but then later in the same problem, the interest payment is listed as being $180,000.