Customer Reviews

Precalculus, Preliminary Edition: A Prelude to Calculus

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

 

 

After working through the author's linear algebra done right book I came across this precalculus book. There is no better book. It has complete - and I mean complete - worked out solutions for all the odd problems. I know many students who have suffered through incredibly badly written books dealing with this subject and most, if not all, of them are. This book is a rigorous introduction to calculus - by this I mean that this book develops all ideas logically that a high school student can understand without an instructor - yes, without an instructor. All the usual topics of precalculus are covered in this book - only much better. Buy this for yourself, for your high schooler child and if you are a math teacher in a high school, at the very least, pilot this book!

This is the perfect book to prepare for Calculus. It is NOT one of those 1000-page tombs with every topic under the sun and tons of exercises. This author clearly knows the material and moreover presents it in a way that one can learn on one's own. There was really attention to detail on topics that are pertinent and important to understand and master in order to move on to the next level. I truly enjoyed the fact that the material in pervious chapters (e.g. functions and their inverse) came up again to understand and master other topics (e.g. logarithms). The best thing There was a mix of example exercises with thoughtful problem-type exercises. I must admit to spending several days mulling over thought problems that involved "proving or showing" that something was true. It made me feel more like Sherlock Holmes and less like some robot doing tons of problems to prove I understood something.
For the readers that provided a low review (which I went over before writing my own) I must say it probably derives from being unprepared for this level of mathematics. I know from friends who don't really read the book for understanding they just find the closest example in the text when they are doing the exercises and move on. This book really starts to move you in the direction where you should read the text slowly and carefully, do some exercises and sit back and enjoy the "thought" problems - this is where the action is and you truly start to understand why mathematicians exist. I am not planning on being a mathematician and consider myself average but I do enjoy solving problems and this author has written a great math book - maybe I would have chosen math as a major if earlier books were so thoughtful in presentation, discussion and exercises.

This book is short, sweet, and to the point. You will not be disappointed.

The explanations in this book are very technical, and it throws a lot of concepts at you full speed. I know what a function is from other books and other math classes I've taken, but here is their definition, "A function associates every number in some set of real numbers, called the domain of the function, with another real number." If that sentence didn't make your thoughts wander as you read that, then maybe this book is for you, but if you had to read it a few times to process it like I did, then you're better off learning pre-calculus from another book unless this is the required text for you class. Even though the theory isn't explained in an engaging way, there are many examples, and the solutions are worked out thoroughly. But then again, whats the point of merely following and memorizing formulas if you don't fully understand what you're doing. I don't believe math has to be boring, but this book makes it very much so.

not quite what i expected.... but it works- dont know how i will sell it back after now. eh.

This is my first time taking Pre-calculas and I can't understand anything it's trying to explain to me in the Log and Natural Log section of the book.
I have a question such as In^X^2x+53. Find X. And then I read the entire chapter on logs and natural logs and it throws down all the technical stuff, mostly graphs and it doesn't even give you one, ONE example on how to do it? So i decided to pay attentions on the graphs. Great I know how it works on the graph but still IT DOES NOT give yoU ANY examples at all. This book is causing me to fail my course. Horrible Horrible book. stay away from it.
I don't know why people are giving this book a lot of stars, they must be working for that company or something.