I am reading TRIGONOMETRY FOR DUMMIES one or two pages at a time. I am quite impressed with the book so far. It isn't really aimed at "dummies," but at people who have a fairly good knowledge of high school algebra, which fortunately I haven't forgotten. Unlike many of the textbooks I have learned from, this one explains all the steps of solving a problem and also defines all the terms. It isn't perfect; I've been confused by a diagram for one thing sharing a page with a definition of another thing. But in general its explanations are clear and free of jargon.

One of the reasons this book is so helpful is that unlike the textbooks, this is designed for someone who is not in a classroom and does not have a teacher as a resource. It is for someone like me who wants to learn in a low-pressure and non-classroom situation. As you well know from reading my frustrated entries about trigonometry four years ago, I struggled with it because I had no one to ask about it, at least without trying to translate my question into an e-mail, and I found my textbooks confusing.

"Dummies" even presents me things that I never learned before, though they seem simple now. For instance, in the chapter about functions, it gives a technique for finding the inverse of a function. (Change f(x) for y, switch the x's in the function to y's and vice versa, then solve for y.) I was puzzled when I first encountered the idea of an inverse function, back in my algebra days, but I am puzzled no more.

The only thing I wish this book had was problem sets. Mathematics learning must always have problem sets. There is a "Trigonometry for Dummies Workbook" out there as a companion volume, which I will get soon. I am willing to work with it now, but when the books get into those maddening trigonometric identities, I may change my opinion. I already own the "Calculus for Dummies" book along with its workbook, but haven't done much with it lately. My current constraints allow only a little bit of math study at a time.

Posted at 4:19 am | link