» Painless Algebra (Barron's Painless)

Painless Algebra (Barron's Painless) Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Algebra
Comment: Excellent service. Book in great condition!! Algebra is NO FUN but we were excited with the illustrations in the book. It will help us to help our 14 year old with her Algebra.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Investment
Comment: I purchased this book after visiting my best friend and saw it on her daughter's bookshelf. I read through the book and thought, this would be a great resource for my 7th grader who struggles with math. I purchased the book and gave it to him to use with his math. My son found the book to be very informative and he has it out whenever he is working on math. The book has helped build his confidence in math. I have recommended the book to a friend and would highly recommend the book as a tool for students struggling with Algebra.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Painless Algebra is pretty painless
Comment: Great book! Explains Alegbra in simple, easy to understand terms. Perfect for Middle School (Algebra 1) students.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Mistakes And Not-So-Painless Problems
Comment: I would like this book a lot more, except: There are mistakes. For example, when asked to graph the coordinate (-4, -2), you go to -4 on the x axis first, then down to -2 on the y axis. She had it backwards. If you don't know what you're doing, and you're taught incorrectly, how are you to learn?

Also, she will present simple information and then give some difficult, and I dare say impossible, problems to solve. If I were learning multiplication, and the teacher threw in fractions, integers, and other things I hadn't learned, I would, of course, get lost. Then my confidence would suffer.

I'm gleaning what I can from this book, but there must be far better ones out there. I don't recommend this.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Outstanding book
Comment: I've had to brush up on Algebra (I haven't used it in decades) and this book does an outstanding job. As a previous reviewer noted, the graph (on page 31) pertaining to rational/irrational numbers is; indeed, incorrect but, as far as I can tell, that's about the only error (BTW, the book does describe the difference between the two sets of numbers correctly - only the diagram is wrong).

Generally speaking, the exercises were excellent and so were the explanations. My only criticism are 1), I wish there were more exercises) and 2), all of the answers need to be explained - there are a few "tricky" questions that are very difficult to figure out if one hasn't used Algebra in a long time. It would be very helpful for the author to come up with a workbook that was correlated with each chapter in "Painless Algebra," in order to further reinforce concepts covered.

The final chapter, on quadratic equations (the bane of my algebraic existence) was the only one that provided much grief. As with most things in mathematics, there is more than one way to find a solution. I ended up using solutions found in other books, that were a bit clearer. Of course, that may just be me and I certainly wouldn't use that criticism to prevent others from using this book - overall, "Painless Algebra" was very well written and I would highly recommend it to others.

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