Essential Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide

This no-nonsense guide provides students and self-learners with a clear and readable study of algebra's most important ideas. Tim Hill's distraction-free approach combines decades of tutoring experience with the proven methods of his Russian math teachers. The result: learn in a few weeks what conventional schools stretch into months.

• Teaches general principles that can be applied to a wide variety of problems.
• Avoids the mindless and excessive routine computations that characterize conventional textbooks.
• Treats algebra as a logically coherent discipline, not as a disjointed collection of techniques.
• Restores proofs to their proper place to remove doubt, convey insight, and encourage precise logical thinking.
• Omits digressions, excessive formalities, and repetitive exercises.
• Covers all the algebra needed to take a calculus course.
• Includes problems (with all solutions) that extend your knowledge rather than merely reinforce it.

Contents
1. A Few Basics
2. Exponents
3. Polynomials
4. Factoring
5. Linear & Quadratic Equations
6. Inequalities & Absolute Values
7. Coordinates in a Plane
8. Functions & Graphs
9. Straight Lines
10. Circles
11. Parabolas
12. Types of Functions
13. Logarithms
14. Dividing Polynomials
15. Systems of Linear Equations
16. Geometric Progressions & Series
17. Arithmetic Progressions
18. Permutation & Combinations
19. The Binomial Theorem
20. Mathematical Induction
21. Solutions

About the Author
Tim Hill is a statistician living in Boulder, Colorado. He holds degrees in mathematics and statistics from Stanford University and the University of Colorado. Tim has written self-teaching guides for Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, Precalculus, Advanced Precalculus, Permutations & Combinations, Mathematics of Money, and Excel Pivot Tables. When he's not crunching numbers, Tim climbs rocks, hikes canyons, and avoids malls.