Intermediate Algebra, Fourth Edition effectively prepares students for their next mathematics course. The text presents all the topics associated with a second course in algebra, providing students with the foundation in the concepts and skills that they need to master in order to succeed in the next course. This book helps students develop the ability to integrate and conceptualize and make the connections between geometric and algebraic solutions. Topics are introduced from a intuitive perspective. This text successfully ...
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Intermediate Algebra, Fourth Edition effectively prepares students for their next mathematics course. The text presents all the topics associated with a second course in algebra, providing students with the foundation in the concepts and skills that they need to master in order to succeed in the next course. This book helps students develop the ability to integrate and conceptualize and make the connections between geometric and algebraic solutions. Topics are introduced from a intuitive perspective. This text successfully meets the needs of a varied student population. Students with less mathematical background will appreciate the non-technical writing of the authors' notes in worked examples, and the review of basic algebra. Students with more skill will appreciate the comprehensive coverage of topics and the challenging problems that appear at the end of exercise sets.
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My major is economics. I love math but hate this book (and 'hate' is a strong word!). This book, for all of it's pages -and price, fails to fully explain the topics it covers (I'm up to chapter 5 of 11). I went to a tutor for help and he said the book is no good at explaining the concepts and told me to put it aside.
If you do not have an instructor who's great at explaining intermediate algebra concepts and the mathematics behind the ideas... you may be lost with this book. I prefer a mathematics book that anticipates questions and one that I can pick up any day of the week to brush up on a concept. This is NOT the text for that.
Why so many colleges use this expensively useless text is beyond me! I purchased Lial, Hornsby & McGinnis' "Beginning and Intermediate" Algebra 4th edition for $12- there may be a more recent version- (ISBN: 0321-4423304) to explain what this book fails to explain. You may want Lial's 10th editon of Intermediate (ISBN: 978-0321443625). These authors write GREAT math books!
If you're registering for an algebra class and see this text as the requirement... make sure you have an excellent instructor, access to a good tutor, the solutions manual OR a better book to supplement!.
Sergio
Nov 8, 2009
nobody in my class likes this book
kind of confusing, Gives you a couple of simple examples and then the exercises are different and very difficult. I think that (college)intermediate algebra can be quite complicated per se for in top of it have so little help from this book. If you are doing exercises from this book and you get stuck and want to check the book, theres no reference to what page to check, like in other books, so you have to look page by page til you find the kind of exercise you need help with.More than half of the time you are not gonna find anything related to the exercises they gave you to do. Nobody in my class understand why the teacher choose this book !!
