Precalculus - Student Textbook (old)

  Bjup Pre-calculus Not the Best

TammyA of Oregon, 4/10/2010

We've been fans of BJUP math for years. We've used 1st and 2nd editions through the years from 7th grade math through Algebra I, II and Geometry, with good success with three children. This year was our first attempt with BJUP's Precalculus (as my son is going on to engineering).

We like how BJUP links foundational concepts together to build thorough understanding of the underlying math principles. We also like the strong solutions manual and teacher helps in their teacher editions.

I must unfortunately warn others that the 2nd Edition Precalculus book does not share the good quality of their prior books.

While it still supplies full solutions to exercises, and some teacher helps, most chapters are moderate in explanation clarity, and numerous chapters have very, very poor explanations (Matrices, Statistics and Calculus in particular).

I'm good with math, took math through Calculus in high school and through pre-calculus in college, and have taught two children up to college level before, but this book was very difficult due to poor and even misleading explanations in the student text reading.

Much of the information is left to the examples with no explanation of why certain things were done.

In struggling to piece this together, and turning to supplmental materials, we discovered key points of information were left out of the explanations...something akin to trying to assemble a kit from instructions that have been translated into English by a non-English speaking person. Prior knowledge is assumed and assembly looks nothing like the pictures.

I cannot recommend this book to others unless you desire to heavily supplement with additional materials for the concept explanations or are very confident and fresh in your precalculus skills.