Customer Reviews

How to Prepare for the AP Calculus

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought two books, barrons' and Princeton's. The former was much harder to understand and contains more information than the latter. When I studied
Princeton's, I was relieved, but when I studied barrons I
became afraid that the test was really that hard. However,
when I took the real test, I found that the actual test
was more like Princeton's than Barrons'; and I got 5 on
the exam. I recommend you to buy this book for experiencing
the hardest questions that would be on the actual exam.
If you only use Princeton's, you may be frustrated to find
that there are some questions that aren't on the Princeton's
practice exams.

I bought this book along with AP Calculus Princeton Commenting on the content of this book, I would agree that the questions are tougher. They are even tougher than the Princeton Review Problem Sets. My advice is that to use both books. The Princeton book is good for explaination and basic calculus Q's. The Barronn's is good for harder Q's and additional explaination to the (BC) parts of the book.

I had several sources to help me do well in AP Calculus AB. One of them was this book.

Finney, Demana et al. "Calculus: Graphical, Numerical, Algebraic" just doesn't include enough problems. To boot, the presentation is pretty poor as too many images are bombarded at your eyes. Barron's includes a lot of extra problems for you to make sure you can apply what you know.

Provided that you work hard in class and outside, this book can help you get a five.

If I could rate this book on the exercises it contains, I'd surely give it a 5 star rating. However, its review is purely pathetic - it uses technical terms that befuddle high school seniors like myself and summarizes tough concepts in cumbersome formulas, none of which are explained. In short, you'd most likely get more benefit reviewing from your textbook than you would with this. So, I reason, 5 stars for the sample exercises averaged with 1 star for the review gives 3 stars.

I would thus recommend this along with W. Michael Kelley's "Master the AP Calculus AB and BC: Teacher Tested Strategies..." which really complements this book. Mr. Kelley's practice exercises are few and spread out, while his review is superior because he knows how a high school student best learns: with calculus explained in real English (though he beautifully manages to never make the student feel incompetent).

So: For REVIEW, choose Mr. Kelley's book; for sample problems, choose this. Good luck preparing for the AP exam!

It's concise and clear for a review book. No use if you're LEARNING form it though, since it's designed to invoke and strengthen memory rather than to explain and teach. Great, challenging questions with good explanations.

This is a book that is best for final preparation for the exam. Last year, in BC Calculus, I was absent for the series and sequences lessons due to an illness and I came back for a test studying through the Barron's books and I had trouble understanding it. The tests are definitely a lot harder than the real thing. I studied my [...] off and got a 5 on the actual exam as well as a 5 on the AB subscore.

This book is very comprehensive, too many details at times. The practice test is a little bit more difficult than the actual test. It is not very well organized or appealing to look. There aren't enough diagrams and pictures for visual learners.

We actually buy this book for my AP class. Students are encouraged to first thoroughly go through our text, and then as a review, we go right through Baron's. I felt the Princeton book is too easy, whereas the Baron's book does a better (much better) job on prepartion and then gives slightly harder practice tests which is the correct way to prepare for the actual exam.

This book is great for calculus, whether you're taking the AP calc test or not. It has many of the basic tricky questions that teacher my try to give you on tests and also shows you how to solve them so that when you see the AP test, you'll know what to do. It's also in a very easy to understand format and tons of practice questions. I got a 5 on the AP Calc. AB exam, so I think it helped.

The review portion of the text was very good (4/5), but the practice test answer explanations were quite brief. What took me half a page of scrap paper was explained by the book in a sentence. If you're just looking for practice AP's, steer clear. For a general overview of single-variable calculus however, it's a decent choice to consider.