Precalculus

Abstract

PreCalculus, Fifth Edition, is designed for a one-term course to prepare students for the standard university calculus sequence. This may be a strange opening sentence to include in this Preface, because every precalculus book should have this as its goal. However,aquickreviewoftheuniversityprecalculusbooksonthemarketrevealsthat nearly all are over 800 pages long, which is far more material than can reasonably be covered in one term. There is so much unnecessary algebra and trigonometry review material in most precalculus books that the precalculus course is often dominated by these topics at the expense of the graphing and function analysis that is needed for calculus.