Customer Reviews

Geometry: A Self-Teaching Guide

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This review is based on the first chapter.

The authors/editors did a poor job reviewing this book for errors. I checked the publisher's website and they do not provide online corrections. Being a self-teaching guide it contains self-tests, but when the answers are wrong it is very confusing to the learner.

The discussion on trapezoids is confusing because they only illustrate isosceles trapezoids (but just call them "trapezoids" ) this gives the impression at all trapezoids are isoceles with base angles of equal value.

Geometry: A Self-Teaching Guide. This is not a bad text, but as a previous reviewer noted, it does have many errors (and I was also confused by the trapaziod section); on the other hand, most recent high school and college texts suffer from the same lack of craftsmanship. A final complaint is that there is no mention of proofs, which I was hoping to learn. I do like the fact that the book is straightforward and, once you learn how to account for the editing errors, it will give you a good grasp of the practical aspects of geometry very quickly. With this book and a good grasp of algebra you will be more than ready for trig.

Rampant with errors. Mislabeled exercises, poorly illustrated diagrams with bad measurements, plain-old typos, and simple calculations done wrong, often several times in a row.

The truth is, every math book has errors that can appear obvious when it is a rare anomaly, but when the same mistake is made over and over, it just gets confusing. On pages 50 and 51, for example, the area of a triangle is repeatedly miscalculated by dividing the base in half twice (the base should be divided once), which gives what appears to be a valid (though wrong) answer. The arithmetic is correct, but the key concept is completely botched. This is only one example of many I have spotted.

I agree with other reviewers, this is more than simple oversight. For a so-called "self-teaching guide," this is negligent.

I was disappointed as I worked through the first two chapters of this book. It is simply riddled with errors. At first, I thought it was just me, but as the errors become more and more blatant, I realized that it was the book and not my inability as a student. One example problem (from Page 44) "Triangle CDE is congruent to Triangle C'D'E'. If angle D=48 degrees and angle E = 17 degrees, find the measure of angle F." It turns out that there would be no angle F in that triangle! If there were just one or two errors in the book, I could let it go, but I've found one such error on almost every page! I'm giving up on this book. It seems like it would have been a good text, but the abundance of errors makes it pretty much useless.

Save your money and don't buy this book. I got the now out of print "Geometry & Trigonometry for Calculus" by Peter Selby, so I'm going to try that next.

This is a great little text with numerous illustrations but with a lot of errors. If you have taken geometry in the past or else are singularly hardheaded you will not be thrown by some of these mistakes that appear even in the self test sections. It is a great review, but remember to trust your own mind while studying the material.