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 methods of his old-school 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 solutions to all problems.

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