[rating:5/5]

I’ve had to brush up on Algebra (I haven’t used it in decades) and this book does an outstanding job. As a previous reviewer noted, the graph (on page 31) pertaining to rational/irrational numbers is; indeed, incorrect but, as far as I can tell, that’s about the only error (BTW, the book does describe the difference between the two sets of numbers correctly – only the diagram is wrong).

Generally speaking, the exercises were excellent and so were the explanations. My only criticism are 1), I wish there were more exercises) and 2), all of the answers need to be explained – there are a few “tricky” questions that are very difficult to figure out if one hasn’t used Algebra in a long time. It would be very helpful for the author to come up with a workbook that was correlated with each chapter in “Painless Algebra,” in order to further reinforce concepts covered.

The final chapter, on quadratic equations (the bane of my algebraic existence) was the only one that provided much grief. As with most things in mathematics, there is more than one way to find a solution. I ended up using solutions found in other books, that were a bit clearer. Of course, that may just be me and I certainly wouldn’t use that criticism to prevent others from using this book – overall, “Painless Algebra” was very well written and I would highly recommend it to others.