Precalculus with Limits: A Graphing Approach

This book... is great. I do take math much more seriously than other students in my classes, but it was only the previous year that I began liking it [I used Larson's Geometry book, 2001 edition, if you are interested. that was the year my interest in math was born]. This year, I am taking this class and using this book. This book has contributed to my hope of becoming a math teacher. I can understand this book. Students who say they don't either have trouble with math in general or are not reading the textbook like I am. Yes, it does go into more detail and uses a little more complicated mathematical language than other books do, and every once in a while I need to ask a question about an example, but overall I rarely need a teacher to understand the examples, not to mention there is so much practice! some sections contain over 100 problems, and though I'm not experienced enough to do all of them myself, I bought a student solutions guide to accompany this book, and it has helped tremendously with a few of the problems I couldn't do. In chapter 6, additional topics in trigonometry, the law of sines and law of cosines are explained very well. I was actually able to "teach" the class for a day when there was a substitute who didn't know math, and I used my notes that I took from the text in that section to teach them. [If you don't believe me, email me and I can probably email you a picture of my notes.] It was great. I'm not guaranteeing that this book is PERFECT, but no textbook is for anyone. I'm just saying it works great for me. I recommend this book ESPECIALLY for an honors class.

Last year I took an Algebra 2 Honors course and the book was absolutely horrendous. My teacher was fantastic, but every once in a while we ran out of time during class to finish the lesson. I would go to the book and try to learn it on my own, very unsuccessfully. However, I must say that trying to teach yourself something out of this book is not impossible; they give good examples and explain them. I do wish they would take a little more time to proove things, because as a student I find it easier to memorize formulas if I know where they came from. Also, I feel that they do a good job covering everything you need to know before you take calculus including Polynomial functions, transcendental functions, trigonometric functions, systems, matrices, statistics and probability, analytic geometry, and 3-demensional space. There is an additional chapter on limits and the first derivative as a rate of change. If you are looking for a book to teach yourself precalculus and limits, this book is fairly safe for that.

This book is simply great with its theoretical explanation on major concepts in precalculus that will prepare you for AP cal. Many have said that this book sucks or dull or hard to understand is simply that they are not into this book or stupid. They do provide a lot of practice set that really makes you practical in math.

Precalculus with Limits, unlike other precalculus books, easily teaches and reviews the basic mathematic background needed for further studies in the area of Calculus. The book contains many examples and less theoretical explanations - briefly outlining how to solve certain problems and then practicing those theories with many examples. Additionally there are plenty examples for economics students, engineering students and students of physics. Simply a great book!