Books For Getting Started With Mathematics

one of the most common questions that people ask is what is a good book for getting started with mathematics and the answer is it really depends on your level of math but in this video i've picked four books that you can use to get started and chances are if you are new to math or you're coming back to math one of these books will help you even if you already know some math chances are these books will help you because there is so much math in each of these books okay let's go ahead and go through each of these books briefly and at the very end of this video i will tell you which one i think is the one worth buying obviously i bought all four so i think they're all worth buying however if i had to pick one i think one of these really stands out from the rest the first book i want to show you is called algebra and trigonometry and it was written by michael sullivan so this is a book that you would use if you went to college and took a course perhaps by the name of precalculus or maybe trigonometry or maybe a pre-calc trig combo course all of those courses would use a book like this the material in a book like this is usually considered a prerequisite before studying calculus at the college level let's briefly go over the contents so you can see what this covers so chapter r is the review chapter and it basically covers stuff that you might cover and say an intermediate algebra course in college chapter one is on equations and inequalities two is on graphs and three is on functions and they're graphs four is on polynomial and rational functions five is on the zeros of a polynomial function then we have exponential and logarithmic functions so the first six chapters are pretty much what you would study in a college algebra course although it is missing some topics which are covered in later chapters chapter 7 is where the trigonometry starts and then it goes into chapter 8 which is more trig 9 is more trig and then 10 you talk about polar coordinates and vectors also usually covered in a trig class chapter 11 covers conics which are usually covered in a precalculus class 12 is on systems of equations and inequalities and then it goes on to sequences induction and the binomial theorem and then we have some counting and probability and then there's an appendix so this book contains tons of mathematics and it can be used to take various courses in college either college algebra precalculus trig or any combination of those courses this book has tons of exercises that you can do for practice and it includes answers to all of the odd numbered exercises my copy is the instructor's edition so it does have answers to all of the exercises but if you get the regular edition i'm pretty sure you only get the odd answers which in my opinion is still pretty good considering how many problems you have in each section for practice the examples are really good as you can see here they show all of the steps they're trying to take a complex number and write it in standard form so they basically multiply the numerator and denominator by the conjugate of 5 minus 12i which is 5 plus 12i and you can see all of the steps are shown so this is a good book for self-study and it's a good book to use as a supplement if you're taking a college course overall the pros of this book are that it's got tons of problems tons of information and great examples cons i can't really think of any this book is going to cost some money it's not super inexpensive but it is available you can find it and i'll try to leave a link in the description after i make this video this next book is even more basic it's called elementary algebra so this is good for someone who is not even ready to take a course like college algebra yet this is the instructor's edition and this one was written by sullivan struve and mozzarella so this book covers really basic algebra this is the type of algebra that is covered before taking a course like college algebra usually in a course like intermediate algebra in college it's very very basic and i think this is a good book for someone who has really bad algebra skills so if you're trying to get started with algebra like factoring and multiplying just really basic stuff this is the kind of book that you want if you feel like you already know how to use the quadratic formula you already can factor you already know basic math then you want to get another book perhaps like the one i showed you before this book also has tons of exercises and you should have answers to all of the odd-numbered problems in the back of the book here's a simple example where they divide a trinomial by a monomial and you can see they show all of the steps and they explain the property of exponents that they're using in all of the steps so i think this is a great book for beginners who want to learn math on their own great for self-study and also great as a supplement the pros of this book are that it is a great book for learning the math that's contained in it it is widely available because it is a newer book i'll try to leave a link in the description the cons are that it only covers elementary algebra it doesn't cover you know more advanced topics like trig and other topics like conics it doesn't cover matrices so it's not great for people who already know a lot of this math it's going to seem very repetitious and very simple so strictly for beginners and highly recommended for beginners it's elementary algebra by sullivan struve and mozzarella okay so this next book i really like this one is called intermediate algebra for college students and it is by light hold and i believe i said that correctly so light hold is a legendary math teacher so who is louis lighthould well in the 80s a movie came out it was called stand and deliver and it was about a calculus teacher named jaime escalante who was absolutely incredible anyways the real jaime escalante was inspired by louis lighthould and he was a legendary teacher in his time this book also has tons of exercises and it has answers to the odd-numbered problems in the back what i especially like about this book though is that some of the exercises are a little bit different from the modern books the other books i showed you are newer and this book is much older so some of the exercises are different and for me that makes it a little more exciting i've read various portions of this book and i've worked through tons of the examples and tons of the exercises and i think it has great explanations i really like this book the biggest downside of this book is that it is very hard to get and if you can find it it might be very expensive and that's because it's out of print and it was written by light hold so a very hard book to get but if you can get it i think it's worth it my copy is really weird because it smells really weird it has a really weird smell i'm just going to give it a whiff yeah it's got a really really weird smell it doesn't smell like my other math books which makes it even more mysterious this last book is a little bit harder than the other books even though the name is basic mathematics so this book was written by the legendary serge land which is one of my favorite authors and this book contains basic mathematics let me briefly show you the contents so he starts off with algebra so he talks about numbers linear equations real numbers quadratic equations and then he talks a little bit about logic sets and let me just emphasize that even though the topics might look similar to the other books the examples and the exercises are very different he actually has you do proofs in some of the exercises so this is very very different from the other books and it's way more advanced he talks about geometry then coordinate geometry then he goes into trigonometry really cool tons of topics talks about some analytic geometry so the parabola the ellipse the hyperbola functions mappings complex numbers induction determinants and there's an index this book also has answers to some of the exercises which is really really good as you can see here some of the answers even include solutions to the proofs that makes it extremely useful for people who are doing self-study this is the section where he defines the sine and cosine function and notice how the type setting is done i just feel like it's extremely clean and extremely well laid out i really like the way that the topics are explained this is very very different from the other textbooks here are some of the exercises in one of the earlier sections and notice they're actually proofs so you're actually doing proofs in this book which makes it a great book for self-study and he actually has examples of proofs in the book which help you prepare for these exercises here's an example of one of the proofs in the book let a be a positive integer if a is even then a squared is even if a is odd then a squared is odd and he goes through both proofs very carefully there's no fluff and they are 100 correct so the pros of this book are that it contains math that you don't see in those other books you're going to find math in this book that is not in the other books and i think that makes it amazing another pro i think is that it was written by serge lang who was a very famous mathematician and i think the explanations are crystal clear it's going to give it a whiff yeah smells pretty good and another pro at least for me is the cover i love the yellow it just looks so cool now the biggest con of this book i think is that it is a paperback and also the price it's pretty hard to find this book really inexpensively it actually took me years to buy this book i have wanted this book for a very very long time and i always decided not to buy it because of the cost and because it was a paperback but i'm really happy that i finally made the purchase so those are four books for getting started with basic math and honestly if you have to buy one my advice would be to buy this one i think this is the one that's worth buying out of all of these books however if you really really just need like a good start with basic algebra despite me thinking that this is the best one you're probably better off with the book by sullivan and if you already know some basic algebra and you want something a little more advanced you want the other book by sullivan algebra and trigonometry so for very very basic beginners go with the elementary algebra if you already know some algebra and you want to learn trig get this one this one it's pretty much i don't want to say impossible to get but it's just kind of hard to find right now because it's out of print so you probably won't be able to get it and if you want to have some fun and learn some really cool math then i would definitely say get this one serge lang basic mathematics really cool stuff so that's it i hope you have enjoyed this video and if you are not subscribed yet please consider subscribing to the channel also i will try to leave links to all of these books the only one i might not be able to find though is this one but i will do my best and see if i can find a copy for you until next time good luck and take care

Channel: The Math Sorcerer

Views: 68,528

Keywords: books for getting started with mathematics, learn mathematics, books for learning math, math books, beginner books, algebra books, math books for beginners, learn algebra with these books

Id: OnBHg6cUyuo

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022