by David Cohen
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Product Description
Get a good grade in your precalculus course with Cohen's PRECALCULUS: A PROBLEMS-ORIENTED APPROACH and it's accompanying CD-ROM! Written in a clear, student-friendly style and providing a graphical perspective so you can develop a visual understanding of college algebra and trigonometry, this text provides you with the tools you need to be successful in this course. Preparing for exams is made easy with iLrn, an online tutorial resource, that gives you access to text-specific tutorials, step-by-step explanations, exercises, quizzes, and one-on-one online help from a tutor. Examples, exercises, applications, and real-life data found throughout the text will help you become a successful mathematics student!
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Grab Bag, 2005-11-24
A grab bag of precalc topics. Makes a good refresher, but not a good intro.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Good chapters, poor layout, 2005-05-14
I see that other reviewers have beaten me to the punch. I, too, found the individual chapters very good and the overall organization confused. Like a previous reviewer, I think Cohen's Precalculus would best serve as a supplement to Michael Sullivan's more effectively organized book.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
 jumbled = confusing = easily forgotten lessons, 2005-02-21
My son was assigned this textbook last year in a junior college math class. He and his classmates found it frustrating. I had to spend hours tutoring him and several of his friends. As a result, I became intimately familiar with Cohen's Precalculus and the confusion it caused students.
My opinion of this book is much like that of the first and last reviewers. There is no discernible order to the chapters; the book doesn't progress in any logical way from what the students have just learned to what immediately follows. (For example: Why didn't the chapter on linear equations immediately follow the chapter on matrices? That's the whole point of matrices--we use them to solve linear equations!).
Sad to say, this book is just a big jumble of miscellaneous material lumped together under the rubric of precalculus. I don't know why the author and publisher chose to arrange the material this way. A previous reviewer suggests that the market forces textbook authors to include everything but the kitchen sink. Even if true, this explanation is irrelevant: it might explain why the book crams so much between its covers, but it doesn't explain the haphazard arrangement of the material. The book certainly didn't do my son or his classmates much good. Although they managed to memorize and regurgitate their lessons well enough to pass the final exam, the mathematical knowledge they gleaned wasn't retained very well because it was never put into any kind of logical order. This book provided no framework that made sense of the random lessons they received. In my opinion, that is not a good way to teach anything, especially an abstract subject like math.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Incoherent is the word, all right, 2005-02-08
I'm an honors math major who had to use this text for a high-school AP math class a few years ago.
The first reviewer has hit the nail on the head. A reader could be forgiven for thinking Cohen suffered from ADHD. He's fine at explaining the small picture, but utterly hopeless at fitting all the little bits into any kind of coherent framework. This book is all over the place, bouncing here and there, seemingly at mere whim. It doesn't really matter WHY it's so disorganized--whether the result of some ed-school fad or a publisher's marketing strategy. In the end, it's still disorganized.
If your professor takes the trouble to rearrange the order of the chapters and provides plenty of supplemental material, this book might be marginally useful. But I certainly wouldn't recommend it as the primary text for a precalc course. Michael Sullivan's textbook is better organized, if not quite so lucid in its particulars.
4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
 The previous reveiwer is incorrect., 2005-01-02
The reason for having every topic under the sun in contemporary freshman math books is not educational fads, it is market forces. I have had many converstations with textbook marketing people and have asked them why they have so many topics in their books. The answer was, 'to have the book adopted by as many departments as possible.' The result: professors must organize and edit the contents of the book, a job that properly belongs to the author and publisher.
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