Bernard Hill Books

.... who is given this as a course textbook. It's touted as an applications book so it's going to get inflicted on non-math majors. Now I'm not saying that proofs are not important, but please give me the intuition and some good examples first. A favourite trick is to give a question which is unclearly drafted and then allow the poor sucker who has to answer it to wade through lemma after proof after corollary trying to find either an explanation or rarer still a relevant example. Makes the subject far harder than it needs to be and is an impediment to learning. AWFUL simply AWFUL.

There are some fairly justified complaints about Kolman's text. Some claim that it is too computational to be of any use to a budding mathematician, and others, that its expository is insufficient to be of use for those in other fields. There are a number of purely computational excersices, but there is no shortage of mathematical rigor in this text. All of the essential theorems are properly presented and constructed, and the subsequent examples are nicely divided between proofs and their application. This text may not be as exhaustive as others, but all of the core material is there. As for those who do not intend to pursue further studies in math, it offers a plethora of related applications including finance, physics, and chemistry. This is a mature textbook, now in it's ninth edition, and it certainly shows. Tougher concepts presented in a number of ways, while simpler ones are kept brief. As for lacking in rigor, I would rebut this claim. The early exercises are often computational, and can be skipped in favor of the later ones which are as rigorous as I have seen. When I first encountered the subject I was already familiar with much of the material, so I opted to go through each of the challenge exercises. At every theorem, I woudl first attempt my own proof, and then compare it with the one offered. If you take the time to do the more difficult problems, you will find yourself more than ready for upper level mathematical courses. You will not find a more palatable introduction to algebraic structures. Compared to other texts, this text is very readable. In short, it is a comprehensive text will challenge its readers. This is the third version of the text to find its way into my library. Recommended.

An ok reference book for linear algebra (I only used it too look up quick formulas and methods), but doesn't have much theory about the topics.

This is by far the worst math book I've ever used. The subject is not at all difficult, but the book does nothing to help students understand the subject. There are too few examples and proofs, and the practice problems are consistently either too basic and tedious or require more advanced reasoning than can be understood from the reading. Do not use this book.

This is a great book for those interested in the theory of linear algebra. If you want to read some theorems and do some proofs in linear algebra, then I highly reccommend this book. I used it in an undergad. course and liked it. I read the first 3 chapters and the chapter on determinants, and I have no big complaints. However, if you are going to use this book for a one semester course in linear algebra, then i'll warn you that it is hard to cover all the material in one semester, and you will probably have to read 3 or more important chapters on your own, but you can learn from this book on your own easily with a little patience and desire for proof writing. Although the book is not an applied version, you will learn about many applications throughout the text. Overall, I recommend this text, and for physics majors, you may want to check out Applied Linear Algebra, The Decoupling Principle by Lorenzo A. Sadun. Also, a student solutions manual is availabe for this book, which you will find helpful if you have never read a mathematical proofs text before.

This course was used for an undergraduate Linear Algebra course I took. It is very poor and would not recommend it under any circumstances.

I tend to learn well from reading math as opposed to lectures but I did not find this book useful. The explanations were simply poor and there is not other way to describe it. Worse a typical example would read "Example X, see exercise Y". There was no example, the authors had simply wasted a line pointing to an exercise later in the text.

I took this course because Linear Algebra is useful subject and is necessary to understand topics I would like to study later. After taking a course using this book, I still think the subject is useful but I am no better prepared to use it.

In the text body and examples it does not provide enough examples of proofs, but instead leaves too many for the student to prove. The assignment problems are drastically different and more difficult than the examples, requiring too much of a leap to understand how to work the problems. Students can find better learning resources from various Web pages.

The material is all over the map -- a little grammer, a little vocabulary, proper nouns, country names, numbers -- perfect for a generation with a short attention span. A French Sesame Street for adults. I found the CDs interesting -- often the vocabulary included words that had not been introduced so it made understanding a real challenge. I have trouble enough hearing the French even when I *know* what the words are.

I purchased this text because an alternative language school designated it for beginning French. Interestingly, they barely use it, instead coming in every week with copied material from other sources.

A note on the book itself. It is made of very slick paper with a lot of pictures and color graphics (see Sesame Street above) so don't get it wet. I spilled a cup of coffee, and all the pages *instantly* glued themselves together. My book is completely ruined. A total (but not a great) loss.

This book takes immersion technique way too far -- it plops you down right in the middle of the French language and makes little effort to actually teach you anything, expecting you to instead just pick things up as it goes along. It contains dialogues which are way beyond a beginner's level, very sparse and incomplete vocabulary lists (which are located AFTER the exercises, so you have to flip ahead just to learn the words), and very few pronunciation guides. One exercise in unit 2 (I didn't get much farther than that) instructs you to translate sentences full of words that the book hasn't taught, many of which aren't even in the glossary, let alone the vocab lists -- I had to look in a dictionary just to complete the exercise. I kept re-checking the cover to make sure that this was supposed to be a beginner's course. By the time I finished the second unit, I was exhausted, frustrated, and angry; I shortly gave up and got a Berlitz book, which was like a breath of fresh air. Now I'm happily making progress in my French studies, no thanks to "Access French." I don't know what the authors of this book were thinking. What a waste of money.

I bought this book hoping that I would get more insight into the raw foods diet. Dr, Jensen re-affirms that whole foods and certain other foods are best for you, but I didn't find his rationale very memorable or convincing. He gets scientific in this book, but I found that none of it was approachable, and after a few times trying to get info out of the book, I gave up. It isn't that there isn't good information in the book, it's just that it's style isn't compatible with my own.

This book presents an introduction to the field of educational technology. The table of contents, with all of its varied topics is quite promising. However, the execution is not very satisfying. Much of the text seems to be descriptive, presenting historical details of educational technology, instead of instructing teachers how to use it, or getting them to think about it. For this reason, it's rather dry and un-engaging-it seems to approach the issues but never quite meets them head on with details.

The book is filled with inaccuracies or ambiguities. For example, on p. 278 Poole writes "Ironically, whereas in 1950 three out of four high school graduates went on to pursue a college education, by 1900 that ratio had fallen to two out of every four, a drop of 25 percent!" Hmmmm. As an example of computers helping students with disabilities, the author draws repeatedly on an article about facilitated communication. Wasn't that disproven with double-blind tests years ago? (In facilitated communication an aide helps a student with severe communication difficulties to type by "holding their hands steady" as they type. Some researchers didn't believe it was really the students typing, so they showed pictures to both aides and students, individually so that they couldn't see each others' pictures. Then they had the students type what they saw with the aides' help. Funny enough, the students "typed" only what the aides saw, never what the students saw, despite the fact that the students never saw what the aides saw.) The book includes questions at the end of chapter. Sometimes the questions are about the material in the chapter itself, and sometimes about the feature article at the end of the chapter (not always related).

Some of the graphics in the book are blurry, and a few are illegible. However, the pictures are great, and would be useful as discussion starters. In general, though, I wouldn't recommend this text. Instead, I would choose alternatives such as Geisert & Futrell's Teachers, Computers, and Curriculum, Morrison's Integrating Computer Technology into the Classroom, or Jonassen's Learning with Technology.

The author seems to have no graduate level education. This book is filled with empirical equations and has no academic deapth. The author himself does not know where each equations come from. Most of the exercise problems are the exact copy from other books. There is no reference listed, and it seems a violation of copywrite. Too many typos and wrongly drawn figures bother readers. This book is a waste of time and money.