Finite Mathematics and Its Applications, Eighth Edition

Rating:
Summary: I'm glad I'm the teacher and not the student!!!
Review: Wow. This book is bad. I have to use this book -- chosen by the department -- for a class I'm teaching. The fact that the book is a bad choice for this class is not the fault of the book -- I was given the text with instructions to teach chapters 1 - 4, 10, and 11, and then to use extra material for topics not covered in the book -- clearly, this text does not fit the class, and either the course should be redesigned, or a different text should be chosen.

Anyway, a first glance was enough to see how miserably this book is organized. The first chapter covers:
1.1 Coordinate Systems and Graphs
1.2 Linear Inequalities
1.3 The Intersection Point of a Pair of Lines
1.4 The Slope of a Straight Line
1.5 The Method of Least Squares

So, section 1.2 is dependent on 1.3 which is dependent on 1.4 -- isn't the order a bit backwards? And then in 1.5, you're on to a topic which is a huge leap in difficulty from learning how to plot a point on Cartesian coordinates from 1.1. Unbelievable.

This type of interdependence carries on through all of the sections of the book that I've looked at (admittedly not all). It seems that one must already know the material from further ahead in the book in order to use the book to learn the material in the given chapter.

I believe that by this Eighth Edition of the book, the authors should be removed from it -- it should be given to students using this text without already knowing it all, and let those students revise and edit the continuity of the material.

Matrix notation is introduced, virtually without explanation of either how to use it or why. Examples are given that attempt to show how to perform some operations on a TI-83 (or similar) calculator, but these efforts fail miserably.

Frankly, I'm having a hard time even figuring out what it is that this book is trying to teach -- and I already understand the material! If, however, the goal of the book is to confuse students such that they should hate and fear all math courses, then the authors have achieved their goals.