Reading The Income Statement (from Motley Fool)

For most non-business people, the Income Statement (and the Balance sheet, for that matter) are total mysteries. In fact, the undergrads in my Principals of Finance class have little clue, even though they've taken one (or soemtimes two) accounting classes.

There's a low-tech, relatively jargon-free guide to the Income statement courtesy of the Motley Fool. They illustrate some of the basic concepts using Herschey's financials.

IBM corp. has a more in-depth guide to financial statements here (full disclosure: I was one of the individals that wrote some of the text for the original version of IBM's guide a LONG time ago). The usual disclaimers apply, blah, blah, blah...