Precalculus: The Easy Way (Barron's Easy Way)

I bought this last winter before I went back to school in the spring to help shake the rust off my math skills. I knew I needed to prepare for the calculus course I'm currently enrolled in. This book has been invaluable to me. It helped awaken dormant skills before I actually took precalculus in the summer. In summer it helped as supplemental practice and instruction. I was even able to use the calculus preview at the end to get some extra practice in towards the beginning of my calc class.I have never been much of a 'self-teach from a book' math person, but the instructions and examples in this book are pretty clearly laid out for most things, that even I could follow it. They're pretty good about making sure to clearly show the steps when breaking down a new skill, and clearly highlighting various formulas and rules. If you can watch a lecture or two on youtube, or if you're currently enrolled in a precalc course, then getting through the material is a breeze.

After happily using a Dummies book to review my algebra, I got this hoping to work up to calculus (I had four semesters of calculus about 50 years ago). Unfortunately it is too succinct with not enough explanation. My first frustration was the word problems in the review of chapter one. There had been no word problems in chapter one and no explanation of how to approach them. Otherwise I did fine with the algebra. The second frustration was the check-up questions at the end of Chapter 2. I could not match the questions to the material and could not figure out how to approach too many the problems. This book may be helpful to current students to use with another book but it was of little use to me. I found a pre-calculus Dummies book and don't expect i'll use this again, after that arrives.

I don’t recommend this book to be your primary source for learning math, however, if you are stuck on a problem or concept. This book is perfect for breaking it down and teaching you how to solve it.