Finite Mathematics : An Applied Approach

Rating:
Summary: Written for teachers, not students
Review: Do textbook authors ever consider how *students* will view their books? I doubt it. It seems to be a consist idea that textbooks -- including and exemplified by this one -- are written by teachers, for teachers, with little regard for students. Just read the product description to see what I mean: "goal-oriented pedagogy", "consistant pedagogical use of color", "enhances student motivation" -- these are items focused to receive acclaim by other teachers.

My question is, have these authors (or others) bothered to ask students how well the book helped them *learn*??? Because, frankly, books may help teachers teach -- or, with college texts like this, they more accurately help research-oriented math professors with little to no teaching background teach -- but do they help students learn? I don't believe so.

While all of this can easily be said of many textbooks, it is blatantly so of this one. It's finite math, blah blah blah. While this book is better than the one by Goldstein et al, it's still blah blah blah for the students.

Rating:
Summary: Finite math blah
Review: This was an alright book for finite math. The book did contain real examples (a positive) along with tons of formulas that I'm not sure that I'll ever see again. The probability stuff was good from this book, but some of the explanations were lacking clarity. Some of the topics include: Finance, linear programming of the simplex method and geometric approach, graphs, trees, counting, statistics along with relations and functions.

Rating:
Summary: Finite math blah
Review: This was an alright book for finite math. The book did contain real examples (a positive) along with tons of formulas that I'm not sure that I'll ever see again. The probability stuff was good from this book, but some of the explanations were lacking clarity. Some of the topics include: Finance, linear programming of the simplex method and geometric approach, graphs, trees, counting, statistics along with relations and functions.