Customer Reviews

GRE Computer Science (REA) 5th Ed. - The Best Test Prep for the GRE (GRE Test Preparation)

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1 star:		(16)

 

 

This book is a waste of money. Not only does it not review any content, but the practice test is full of errors. Just for a single example, look at the first question on the practice test. They claim the answer is C. Actually, C would be an in-order traversal; the correct answer is E. Trying to learn from this book would only confuse you.

This book is 170 pages. 100 pages are devoted to a single (only 1!) practice test. 30 pages are basically boilerplate prep book garbage (here's how to register; here are some general "test taking strategies). The remaining 40 pages claim to have content review. In fact, they only tell you what you should know, they don't review it at all. For instance, in the section on "Recurrence Relations," (p41) it says: "You need to be familiar with a few simple examples of solving reccurence relations, which will provide adequate review of the basic methods and tie them to concrete applications." That's it. It doesn't review what a recurrence relation is, or give any equations, or remind you how to solve them. It just tells you that you should know them, which you could have figured out from the ETS website.

I bought this book because it was the only CS GRE review book my local bookstore had. But I am going to return it right away. Don't make the same mistake I did! This book contains no useful review, and actually has major errors in the practice test.

I guarantee that using this book will lower your CS GRE score, between the misinformation and errors it contains and the time you'll waste that could be spent on more useful review tactics. I can only hope I stopped reading it soon enough.

Interestingly enough, the author of the brief review section goes on a rant about what makes a bad practice test, in which he manages to describe many features of the practice test in the book itself. I wonder if he saw the questions that had been written by an outsourced team, felt a little remorse, and decided to give a bit of a warning to careful readers to atone for the fact that he'll profit from having his name on this piece of trash. Or maybe he never saw the test questions. Or maybe I'm giving him too much of the benefit of the doubt, and he's simply an astounding hypocrite who knows that you can sell anything as a test review book.

I ordered this book before any of the customer reviews were written, and therefore had no idea that this book would be so bad.

The first "useful" page of the book confused me (page xv). I didn't expect glaringly obvious typos on the section "Notation and Conventions", but they were there: the symbol for the floor of a real number is defined as both the floor and the ceiling. Also, supposedly, the notation "A" is used to mean "NOT A".

I skipped ahead a few pages to the claimed "Comprehensive" review of all exam topics. Once again, I was disappointed: the discussion was on the probability of each topic on the exam, instead of the topic itself. I decided once again to skip ahead a few pages and take the practice exam, because that was why I bought the book in the first place.

Foiled again! The practice exam had errors in every other question. Some questions had missing diagrams; some questions had extra diagrams; some questions had no correct answers at all! But the worst past was that most of the questions in this book are nothing like the questions on the actual exam! I've taken it once before and I'm seeking to improve my score; but reading this book only made me doubt myself even more.

Well, no. But it did make me doubt author's competence. I haven't learned anything from reading it, and I don't think anyone else will, either. Avoid at all costs. Beware!

I can't believe how bad this book is. There are so many glaring mistakes, it is ridiculous! A lot of the answers that they say are correct are obviously wrong. The author of this book should be ashamed. Buy this book only if you want to perform worse on the GRE exam.

I am amazed how a serious publishing company can let such trash go out under its name. This book looks like it was written overnight. There has been absolutely no proofreading or editing whatsover. There are abundant mistakes ranging from simple typographic errors, poor lexical choices, and inadequate sentence structures to conceptual and logical errors, inconsistent questions, missing diagrams, and mismatched answers.

In addition to what everyone else said, I add that the book contains a great deal of text that seemed to imply the author was being paid by the word: for example, the section on "clocked circuits", which says "I don't know anything about clocked circuits, so maybe you'll want to skip those questions on the test" -- only in about four times as many words as that.

A+++++, would be misinformed by again!

I would've given this book a -1 if I could. One of the most poorly written books ever! The most useful part of this book was the "Content Review Section", where the book goes over all the major topics. But even then the author only skimmed over the topics -- not much content review!

The practice exam, like the others have said, is absolutely horrible. Tons of mistakes; it had wrong solutions marked, or more than one correct choice. In short, do NOT buy this book!

(...). I got this book because it was the only thing out there - I thought, whatever the rating, it can't be worse than nothing, at least there's a practice test. That's not a good reason! I was wrong! Just review your textbooks! Or maybe browse Wikipedia, if you don't have any textbooks... or just get some sleep...

I couldn't even force myself to finish the practice test. As another reviewer notes, the very first question has the wrong answer listed. But even before you get to checking your answers, you'll notice all kinds of problems. The test is full of ambiguous or nonsensical wording, as well as simple typos. It does things with its questions that a real standardized test never will: for example, in at least one case it requires a correct answer to one question in order to get the next. Or, another example, it asks multiple questions that are purely about terminology. It has a bizarre balance of content - the question writers seem to be obsessed by context-free grammars. I could go on...

This book is sufficiently bad that:
1) I regret buying it, and marking it up enough to make it impossible to return, as much because it means I gave money to a pack of fraudsters as because I wasted time taking half the practice test.
2) I would never consider buying another book not just from this author, but from this publisher.
3)(...)

Like other reviewers, I bought this book because it was in-stock. Like other reviewers, I found the book... lacking in correctness. It's hard to study for a test from a book that has incorrect answers. I have _ZERO_ confidence that this book has in ANY way prepared me for the CompSci GRE test :( I wish I had read the reviews before purchasing this, and both the author and publisher will be getting a nastygram about this one.

I agree wholeheartedly with the other reviewers. It would do the field of computer science education enormous good if all copies of this book were piled high and set ablaze in a giant bonfire.