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David Cohen's PRECALCULUS: A PROBLEMS-ORIENTED APPROACH, Sixth Edition, focuses on teaching mathematics by using a graphical perspective throughout to provide a visual understanding of college algebra and trigonometry. The author is known for his clear writing style and the numerous quality exercises and applications he includes in his respected texts. In this new edition, graphs, visualization of data, and functions are now introduced much earlier and receive greater emphasis. Many sections now contain more examples and exercises involving applications and real-life data. While this edition takes the existence of the graphing calculator for granted, the material is arranged so that one can teach the course with as much or as little graphing utility work as he/she wishes.
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By Anthony J. Gomez Diaz
This book is written to a very understandable degree. If you are finding it difficult to understand then the problem is not the book its you. While some of the chapters may be better organized the book is not a total loss. After all you do only have to look in the appendix to find the topic you want to study about. All information is in this book including a 2 chapter review of basic algebra.
While I don't love the book, I am having no problem with it.
By I. R. Paul (Berkeley, CA)
A grab bag of precalc topics. Makes a good refresher, but not a good intro.
By reader
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.
By annoyed dad (Madison, WI)
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.
By Pete Nedervetil (Los Angeles)
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.
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