Customer Reviews

College Algebra

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I've just finished using this book and, while I normally keep my textbooks as reference materials, I found this book to be so bad that I'm selling it back! This book falls short when it comes to providing solid examples; clear, concise text; and valid exercises. Specifically, the pages are so crammed full of text and colors that it is often difficult to quickly find specific information. Much of the text and many of the examples fail to adequately prepare the student for the exercise sets. Additionally, the accompanying solution manual, which helped me immensely, has numerous typos and is missing several pages of solutions. I wish I were alone in my opinion, but the overwhelming majority of my class felt about the same. Even our professor was less than impressed. If this is the textbook you must have for class, get some additional references, i.e. Schaums, or something similar, perhaps even another 5 star rated book from Amazon.

The book was in a good condition just like it said, and I received it so quickly! Just in time for my classes to start! Great seller!

This book is a must have for all students. It shows you step by step how to do the odd problems in each chapter. I highly recommend it!

The book was new as promise, and I was very satisfied with the delivery time the next day

To date, this is the worst textbook I have encountered in my math classes. In fact the instructor uses this book for homework assignments only as the text itself is useless.

To start with, I found the explanations to be badly written, wordy, and confusing. Seems as though this book was designed for a refreshment course rather than for people who are going over the material for the first time.

Then, the examples: there are not enough of them, and the examples do not support the exercises at the end of the section, so if you work out the exercises at the end of the section and encounter a problem, you just don't have an example to help you out.

It continues with the student solution manual on line: due to the lack of examples the student's solution manual is the next tool to try to figure things out. However, the manual appears to be put together almost as an after thought. It is very unorganized, uses shortcuts to the solutions that are sometimes difficult to figure out.

In summery, this book makes it difficult to learn on your own. It does not help deepen and re-enforce your understanding of the material covered in class. From my experience so far, there are much better books that make the time learning more efficient, productive, and fun.

This book is written for the average college student. The
material is illustrated well and there are many examples
depicting the mathematical concepts. More advanced students
are sufficiently challenged, average students will work hard
and below-average students may have problems. It is important
for the instructor to assign frequent homeworks and review
the homeworks before continuing with new material. A small
minority of students enter college having had NO ALGEBRA in
high school. I wish that some of these students would return
to high school to complete the work they never finished.
Overall, I'm satisfied that the text represents a fair
concensus of the problems encountered in College Algebra.
There are sufficient word problems which require students
to translate verbiage into mathematical formulas. In addition,
classic areas; such as, "complete the square" are covered
thoroughly.

As others have stated, incomplete explanations (skipping steps), poor examples and confusing jargon...everything NOT desired while attempting to learn math at this level -- and this sentiment was echoed by most other students in my class. Only a gifted math professor would be able to utilize this text with positive results! However, I did find the book to make an excellent fire-starter!

This book tries to cover too much and doesn't explain much of anything in detail. My college instructor didn't like the book. My tutor didn't like the book. As far as I can tell, no one thought this book was worth the paper it was written on. I had a very difficlut time following the material. If you have to take a college algebra class, pray this is not the book that is required!

I downloaded this book under the assumption that it would be working with the Kindle app for iPad and iPhone. Apparently that is not the case. This title will only work on Kindle for PC or Mac; it does not even work on Amazon's Kindle devices. What kind of company would allow this to happen? Obviously one that tries to take the cheap way out of everything. No wonder this eBook only costs $34. Anyways, I called Kindle tech support and the representative was not helpful at all. The Kindle specialist told me that the page where I bought my textbook from said that the book was exclusively for the Kindle for PC or Mac apps, even though that if you read the text associated with the "Optimized for larger screens" text, it says that this title was meant for the Kindle and iPad. And before I even talked to the Kindle specialist, I spent an hour talking to a very kind woman, but she was not trained well enough to save me 45 minutes of trying several things to make an incompatible title work with my iPad and iPhone. This was my first Kindle experience and it was horrible. Kno.com has the same book and it works on iPad, PC, or Mac. The price is more, but obviously your money is being used to actually make things work in a convenient way that suites you. Kno's sample books actually work when you download them to your iPad, iPhone, PC or Mac, unlike the Oxford American Dictionary that only works for Amazon's Kindle. Bottom line: Kno.com beats Kindle in compatibility, features, and customer support. If you are ever looking to buy any other eBooks and you want to have the peace of mind that your book will be able to work on any of your iOS devices, try Apple's iBooks Store. Those books won't work on your PC or mac, but laptops and desktops aren't really meant for reading an entire novel anyways.

i had been trying to get the correct college algebra book from my college bookstore for sevral weeks, and never got anything. ordered it from here and got it the next day in almost perfect condition. it had alittle writing in it but it was used and not much you can do about that, but even the writing did little to bother me as it was all written with a pencil so easily removed. all in all i would buy from here again anyday.