Customer Reviews

Algebra & Trigonometry Enhanced with Graphing Utilities (3rd Edition)

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A neat aspect of this book is how it starts with an extensive Review chapter. Going over concepts like elementary geometry and algebra. This addresses a problem faced by many textbook authors. The audience can have widely divergent backgrounds. So the Review aims to calibrate students to a known base.

The regular chapters then each go into a profusion of examples. Often with colourfully drawn diagrams. It is granted that some students with intrinsic ability will only need a few such examples to grasp the ideas in them. But the authors clearly hope that by furnishing enough examples, most diligent readers will be able to latch onto and understand some.

Perhaps the hardest sections may be on analytic trigonometry and its applications. The numerous questions on proving trig identities can be fun to some and opaque to others. I enjoyed this stuff in other, earlier texts. But some readers will need to spent a lot of time scrutinising these chapters.

What is striking about the examples is that they use Imperial units, like feet and miles per hour, instead of metric units. By now, most science and engineering texts, even in the US, have gone over to mostly, if not entirely, metric. Seems discordant and slightly archaic to find a text that does not do so.