Customer Reviews

Painless Geometry (Barron's Painless)

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

 

 

Since I'm homeschooling my high school sophomore this year, I've been spending time looking at math books. "Painless Geometry" seemed like a good bet. Profusely illustrated (albeit with silly monkey pictures) and written in plain English, it looked like just what we'd want.

That's until I started actually using the book. First of all, who ever heard of a 300-page reference book with only three pages of index? How are you supposed to find things that way? It's missing things like the base of a triangle (the index has neither "base" nor "triangle:base") and how to label an angle. The information's in the book, but you certainly can't find it using the index. Not only that, but the pages aren't labeled like a normal book, with the name and number of the chapter at the top or bottom of each page. You can't find your place in a book that way!

There's little depth to the book. There are experiments with pencil and paper, but no real-world examples of where you'd use geometry. Area is calculated in "square units" with no discussion of real units of measure. Pi is introduced with a single paragraph. No explanation is given of its rich history, how it's calculated, or applicability throughout mathematics.

The oversimplifications in this book may make life difficult later. The book states that all angles are measured in degrees, and the degrees symbol is generally omitted. Whatever happened to radians? In one of the problems, she asks for the area of a circle with diameter of ten. The correct answer is 100 times pi. The book states the answer as 314. That's an approximation, not an answer!

Then we started finding the mistakes. Typos like "Computer the area of a circle" (page 184) I can live with. It's hard core mistakes like these I can't tolerate:

The reader is asked to identify what type of triangle has angles of 120, 35, and 35 degrees (page 101). The answer says it's isosceles and obtuse. In reality, it's not a triangle at all, as the angles don't add up to 180 degrees!

How's this for a statement of the Side-Angle-Side postulate (page 126)? "If two sides and the included angle of one triangle are congruent to two triangles and the included angle of a second triangle, then the triangles are congruent." Huh?

There's a "super brain tickler" on page 163 which indicates, according to the answers in the book, that for squares, rhombuses, rectangles, and parallelograms, all four sides are parallel! No. Four parallel line segments wouldn't ever meet. Those four shapes have two sets of parallel sides, not one set of four parallel sides!

.... That tends to leave us with drek like "Painless Geometry."

All in all, I found this book to be poorly proofread, ridded with errors, badly indexed, oversimplified, and disconnected from the real world. It may be good as an adjunct for a student having trouble with a real geometry book, but only if there's someone around to explain what "Painless Geometry" omits or misstates.

I've been meaning to write a review to respond to those on this page for a while. I guess I have used so many math books that contain an error or two that I just can't possibly throw away such a good book over that.

The fact is that we homeschool and my son LOVED this book which we picked up at the library. It is full of wonderful, hands-on work and SIMPLE explanations that make geometry easier to understand than most other books we tried - yes, truly understand because you not only had it explained well, but also "did" something on paper or folding paper to experience it.

He enjoyed it so much that when I picked up another Painless book at the used book store, he wanted to start it that day, rather than waiting 'til next semester.

So I don't know if y'all just glanced at the book or really tried it, but this family tried it and loved it - and I own a red marker so I can cross out the one incorrect answer I found in my edition!

On page 16, it is stated that the area of a circle is pi times the diameter. Is there anybody out there who DOESN'T know that the area of a circle is pi times the square of the radius? That error wouldn't such a big deal, except that there are plenty more to come. I don't recommend this book to anyone.

I am the author of PAINLESS GEOMETRY and PAINLESS ALGEBRA. I read past reviews about the errors in the book and for that I apologize. I want you to know that the new edition of the book published in 2009 is essentially error free. I have put a lot of thought into creating PAINLESS GEOMETRY so that it could teach geometry painlessly. Each example and exercise was chosen to teach both obvious and hidden lessons. I have taught high school and college math, served as a school principal and have written twenty math books. I thnk PAINLESS GEOMETRY is the easiest and best constructed book on the market. I hope you give it a try.

My son went through Painless Algebra and it was a good book. Naturally, we tried to use this book from the same author. Disappointed. The book is simply not well written. This sounds very general but it's an appropriate way to "generalize" it.

For example, on pages 13-14, it introduces concepts of inductive proofs and deductive proofs. The introduction itself is pointless and cluelessly done at the beginning of the book. On pages 14-16, it gives almost 20 geometric symbols without explanation of concepts behind the symbols. For someone new to geometry, it's just too much. On Chapter 2, page 23, it introduces the concept of angle. Then on page 30, without any mention of degrees of a line and a circle so far, the book uses exactly these two concepts to get the measurement of an angle larger than 180 degree ("reflex angle"). Then strangely, on the next section, the book introduces the concepts of right angle, obtuse angle, straight angle, etc, which should be done earlier. Also, the book simply does not put any emphasis on right angle, which I believe that a clear understanding of the concept is extremely important to get real traction on geometry (for example, trig is almost exclusive on right triangles).

Another example on last chapter. On page 261, it gives midpoint formula, without any explanation why. Several pages late, it gives the distance formula, without explanation again. Then after introduction of these two relatively difficult formulas, the book takes great pain to show how to graph a line by plotting points, which is pretty easy to understand and to do. Like in Painless algebra, the book insists to graph three points to get a line, while two points are suffice. It's laughable to talk about graphing a line so late in a book when such concepts of trapezoids, area, volume, chords, tangents, and Pythagorean Theorem, etc. have been covered way earlier.

Similar examples are plenty. To summarize again, this book is not well written. For beginner, to find another book to start; for students to get better understanding of geometry, find a book more systematic and deeper in presentation of concepts, formulas.

Great tool for young mathematicians new to Geometry. Supplements school textbooks -- exercises in the book facilitate review of concepts learned in class.

This book targets those in middle and high school having trouble getting Algebra. I am a teacher and hoped it would be a resource easier to understand than our Algebra textbooks. This was not the case. Aklthough the book works well in the early part of the book, it quickly grounds to a halt. The author tries to condense too much and she leaves out explaining some steps in the process. Those ommissions turn out to be crucial. You have to already know a lot about the skill she is talking about to have any hope of understaning or following her. The book quickly became very painful. I tried it with students and it is worse than standard textbooks. The students could not follow her at all after the first one sixth or so of the book. I would not recommend this as your primary teaching source for algebra. Ouch!