College Algebra

Rating:
Summary: ".....you're going to need a different book!!
Review: I've just finished using this book and, while I normally keep my textbooks as reference materials, I found this book to be so bad that I'm selling it back! This book falls short when it comes to providing solid examples; clear, concise text; and valid exercises. Specifically, the pages are so crammed full of text and colors that it is often difficult to quickly find specific information. Much of the text and many of the examples fail to adequately prepare the student for the exercise sets. Additionally, the accompanying solution manual, which helped me immensely, has numerous typos and is missing several pages of solutions. I wish I were alone in my opinion, but the overwhelming majority of my class felt about the same. Even our professor was less than impressed. If this is the textbook you must have for class, get some additional references, i.e. Schaums, or something similar, perhaps even another 5 star rated book from Amazon.

Rating:
Summary: College Algebra by Aufmann
Review: This book is written for the average college student. The
material is illustrated well and there are many examples
depicting the mathematical concepts. More advanced students
are sufficiently challenged, average students will work hard
and below-average students may have problems. It is important
for the instructor to assign frequent homeworks and review
the homeworks before continuing with new material. A small
minority of students enter college having had NO ALGEBRA in
high school. I wish that some of these students would return
to high school to complete the work they never finished.
Overall, I'm satisfied that the text represents a fair
concensus of the problems encountered in College Algebra.
There are sufficient word problems which require students
to translate verbiage into mathematical formulas. In addition,
classic areas; such as, "complete the square" are covered
thoroughly.

Rating:
Summary: Drop the class if this is the text-book.
Review: To date, this is the worst textbook I have encountered in my math classes. In fact the instructor uses this book for homework assignments only as the text itself is useless.

To start with, I found the explanations to be badly written, wordy, and confusing. Seems as though this book was designed for a refreshment course rather than for people who are going over the material for the first time.

Then, the examples: there are not enough of them, and the examples do not support the exercises at the end of the section, so if you work out the exercises at the end of the section and encounter a problem, you just don't have an example to help you out.

It continues with the student solution manual on line: due to the lack of examples the student's solution manual is the next tool to try to figure things out. However, the manual appears to be put together almost as an after thought. It is very unorganized, uses shortcuts to the solutions that are sometimes difficult to figure out.

In summery, this book makes it difficult to learn on your own. It does not help deepen and re-enforce your understanding of the material covered in class. From my experience so far, there are much better books that make the time learning more efficient, productive, and fun.