I am in the midst of taking the third in a succession of algebra courses using this particular series of textbooks. This book, by far, surpasses the others in difficulty of use! Many of the illustrations seem to have little or no bearing upon the problems given and the explanations can be obscure at best. The book is also poorly edited making matters even worse. If you have never before experienced the height of frustration, I would recommend this book as a means of getting there. The sad part is that I really wanted to like algebra and this book has made it almost impossible.

This is the third algebra class I've taken and I received an A on my other two classes. Using this textbook, I'll be fortunate to pass. The problems are not explained well, there are not examples for every type of problem, the review problems and test at the end of each chapter do not having the corresponding section from which they were taken. The way the authors explain problems are different from what I was taught before. Given a choice, I would not buy this textbook. I have to go to my intermediate text by a different author and even that doesn't help much.

This book will leave you dazed and confused if you don't have a lot of mathematical background. The authors assume that you already know everything about algebra and don't really explain certain things or steps that you need to take to get a certain answer. In order to completely understand this book you need the intermediate algebra book that has been written by almost all the same authors... If you don't use the intermediate algebra book as a reference you'll just be dazed and confused!

Bad Book on an already hard subject. There are better books out there. Don't waste your money or time on this stinker. It left me dazed and confused. It didn't teach the subject just gave examples which would be fine, if the examples were based on the exercise problems. What a waste of paper.

This was a horrible text book. It does not help with teaching, or with explaining the topic at hand. Instead it gives examples,which would be fine except the examples were not like the exercise problems. The book left me confused, and with plenty of questions for my instructor. I hated this book, and looked for better books to get me through the class. Alot of money for nothing. There are better books out there.

The book itself is OK at best. The author makes use of OK examples but has some very good questions. Too bad its hard to solve the more advanced questions he asks from the examples given.

In compairing the 7th and 8th editions there is almost NO difference between the two. I think I ran accross under 10( at most) total changes, and they were VERY minor. Why print another edition? More money to charge university students is probably why.

Oh, and I did very well in the 2 semesters...so Im not just bitching either!