Precalculus

Over the years, the text has been shaped and adapted to meet the changing needs of both students and educators. As always, special care was taken to respond to the specific suggestions of users and reviewers through enhanced discussions, new and updated examples and exercises and helpful features. The result is an easy-to-use, comprehensive text that is the best edition yet.

Customer Reviews:

neatly organised and pleasant to self-study

By Brenda Chang - February 3, 2004

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.

Beware the "paperback edition" - it's the answer book

By Collin - March 13, 2004

Last week I ordered a copy of the "paperback edition" of this
book, with ASIN 032100969X. This is NOT a paperback edition!
It is the "Student's Solusions Manual - Precalculus" -- great if
that's what you're looking for, but if you wanted a paperback
edition of the textbook (in this case, for my teen-aged
daughter), you may be disappointed. This is not the textbook
plus answers -- it's just the solutions!At first I was going to take this up with the vendor
(ecampus.com, who by the way shipped it right on time; it got
here in under a week with standard shipping), but then I realized
it wasn't their fault -- it was amazon.com's description that
was faulty :^<Oh, the solutions book does have at least one minor typo: p.173,
#105, "The expression is not undefined if (x+1)(x-4)=0, that
is, if x=-1 or x=4. Thus, the domain is the set of all real
numbers except x= -1 and x=4" They meant... read more

Precalculus book with minor imperfections!

By Iggy S. "iggy" - May 28, 2005

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... read more