Pre-Calculus for Dummies

by Krystle Rose Forseth

Getting ready for calculus but still feel a bit confused? Have no fear. Pre-Calculus For Dummies is an unintimidating, hands-on guide that walks you through all the essential topics, from absolute value and quadratic equations to logarithms and exponential functions to trig identities and matrix operations. With the help of this clear, easy-to-use resource, you'll soon get a handle on all of the concepts - not just the number crunching - and understand...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470169842
• ISBN13: 9780470169841
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: For Dummies
• Length: 382 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

review of pre-calculus for dummies

a great book that was delivered in great condition in a very timely manner. Thank you!

great help!

This book is well-written. It explains the most complex lessons, from class, and "dumbs it down" for those of us who need that extra help. Pre-Cal for Dummies has helped me in many cases.

Excellent Excercise Book but some mistakes and no errata???

It seems the authors break their own rule in the first chapter on PEMDAS. This is a simple problem, but they wrote it out wrong in answers where they perform addition and subtraction first before multiplication. I think it should be the other way around. i.e. Ex 4 - Ch 1. abs(5 * 1 - 4 + 6) = 7 not 9. Every monkey knows multiplication is performed first. I'm not sure what the authors were thinking starting with subtraction first???I'm kinda blushing here...I punched this into my TI-89 Titanium and I get the same answer as I had come up with for the nominator. Calculators follow PEMDAS rule, so am I missing something here? Please, put an errata up people and have a forum, otherwise your books are useless. This is a refresher for me as I'm going in for calculus next fall. Mistakes as such would flunk a student in those courses...

Dummies

I translate for engineering students from foreign countries, and I use this book to help me with my limited knowledge of Calculus, pre-Calculus, etc. I find all the "for Dummies" series very helpful.

Good book but not perfect

The aim of this book is to introduce the subjects of pre-calculus in an easy, yet complete way. For the most part it accomplish it's objective, nevertheless, it has some typos and errors that will cause the student to get confused (i.e. the first time the student is shown the formula for the difference of cubes the book says something like this (a-b)(a^2+ab+b^3) which is wrong and in latter examples the formula takes the correct form of (a-b)(a^2+ab+b^2) which causes some confusion). Overall, this is a very good book specially for a review of the subjects. UPDATE P.105 Changing a Log's Base log5/log3 does not equal ln3/ln5... it should read log5/log3 = ln5/ln3.