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

About the Author
Tim Hill is a private math tutor and data scientist living in Boulder, Colorado. He holds degrees in mathematics and statistics from Stanford University and the University of Colorado. When he's not crunching numbers, Tim climbs rocks, hikes canyons, and avoids malls.