best specialist text book?

[max payne]

yeah so what brand specialist maths book is best? any reasons why?

[LOLs99]

Derrick Ha books are the best!
and maths quest should be fine as well.

[Romperait]

I used Math Quest and Essentials throughout this year and I found that Essentials provided higher quality questions than that of Math Quest. Having said that, both provide sufficiently good explanations so really either would more than suffice.

[max payne]

what about heinemann, any views on that text book?

[LOLs99]

Well, you can accept that it's still quite good still and just normal..
but I personally think that maths quest would be more useful.
Well, I suggest you go through different textbooks but not just one
so you will get expose to many different types of questions

[Hutchoo]

what about heinemann, any views on that text book?

I've been using that companies book for maths for 4 years. For Methods and Spesh, I found it to be quite.. crappy to be honest. The worked examples are seriously stupid, the explanations are somewhat worthless and the questions tend to be relatively easy (in comparison to Essentials).
I reckon you should at least get the PDF for essentials and try out their extended response questions.

[Special At Specialist]

I think that the essential textbook is awesome. It's set out really well and the quality of the questions are very good. It has very good extended response questions towards the end of the chapter, some of which are harder than the hardest exam question you would ever come across.

The only other textbook I tried was MathsWorld, which was just pathetic. It made me never want to open the textbook again.

[Ravit]

^sums up everything i wanted to say

[rife168]

I have a hard copy of Heinemann, Essentials and Quest (We use heinemann in class)
I would say that Quest is good for examples and definitions, the Essentials questions are great (especially the extended response) and Heinemann is pretty well inferior unfortunately. I think the only good part is that there are fewer questions than essentials so one could work through the book faster.

I think it's important to take from all of the books, as the VCAA doesn't give different exams depending on what textbook you use.

[paulsterio]

Essential is just too hard LOL!

[luken93]

Quest for explanations, Essentials for questions

[pi]

Quest for explanations, Essentials for questions

+1, I also liked Dr G's Specialist Maths Dimensions for explanations too

[mr.politiks]

Essentials for questions, definitely Derrick Ha for explanations (but DH is not so great for CAS, especially nspire and classpad), so quest is good as a starter for CAS skills (which are almost as important as your maths skills, u need to be able to touch type on your CAS). For CAS, h/w, text books won't work as much as developing your CAS skills independently over the year, and picking up on any tricks and shortcuts from friends and teachers.

[Planck's constant]

yeah so what brand specialist maths book is best? any reasons why?

Keep it really simple. All you need is :

Textbook : Essentials
Other: Checkpoints, A+ Mathematical Notes

If you are interested in a logical study plan b/w now and EOY exams, let me know and I'll put something up


.

[max payne]

yeah so what brand specialist maths book is best? any reasons why?

Keep it really simple. All you need is :

Textbook : Essentials
Other: Checkpoints, A+ Mathematical Notes

If you are interested in a logical study plan b/w now and EOY exams, let me know and I'll put something up


.

sure that would be great