Precalculus

This was an excellent book. My child whipped thru the book in three months getting an "A" in class. The word problems were the best because it really made him hone his analytical skills. I highly recommend the book.

This textbook is one excellent aid for understanding math. The trigonometry section is the best part of the book. It is mostly self explanatory, and being that trig is one hard topic to understand, the book breaks it down to a comprehensible level. My only problem with the book is that it contains way too many word problems, which most students would like to skip. The concept checks are also a pain in the butt. My professor assigns basically all the odd problems in the section, taking me a whole day to finish the homework. There are other minor annoyances in the book. For example, the harmonic motion section only provides one example for the whole section. A good thing to have is the solutions manual. There are also way too many things to cover, and this leaves you somewaht overwhelmed. On the other hand, Lial and Hornsby provide straight forward examples, which, are sometimes way to easy in comparison to the practice problems provided. This book is however, a quality book and well presented.

This is a beautiful book that leads from algebra very smoothly. As a precursor for calculus, it covers all the important topics such as trigonometric functions, identities and equations, polynomial, exponential, rational and logarithmic functions and some analytic geometry. The only topic that it is lacking is probability and statistics. The majority of the problems have real-life applications accompanied by colourful pictures. With an average of about 90 problems in each chapter section, it does a good job of not being too repetitive. The chapter readings are easy to comprehend and well-organised into little sections and examples.Overall this is a great textbook to self-study Precalculus from and I had a painless time absorbing it.