Roads to Geometry, Third Edition

Rating:
Summary: Confusing and overly-condensed
Review: *Note: this refers to the second edition.

Author: CS/Math double major at Cameron University.

This is the book I unfortunately got stuck with for my College Geometry class at Cameron. Thankfully I had a great teacher and I enjoyed the class in addition to getting an 'A', but that was no thanks to this textbook. Our class and the textbook were proof-oriented and designed to introduce the student to the basic axioms, theorems, and developments of several geometries. The book doesn't go extremely in-depth into any geometry but it was only designed to introduce the basic logic and principles of the geometries anyway. The problem is the extreme conciseness and unclarity of the material. Chapter 1 is written well enough, giving the reader a good foundation in axiomatic development. From then on, each chapter starts with a list of axioms and explanations and then it's the traditional theorem-proof-theorem-proof format. Unfortunately, the proofs are condensed into as compact a format as possible. The way the proofs were written, it kind of made the book feel like 1000 page book crammed into 400. The drawings are somewhat helpful but even those are lacking. Also, a series of exercises are given at the end of each section yet no answers are given in the back. And, like most geometry books, there's no available study guide. On the plus side, the exercises have a nice range of difficulty, from trivial to virtually impossible and everything in between.

Avoid if you can or pray you get a good teacher like I did.

Rating:
Summary: Roads to Geometry - Traffic Jam
Review: I am currently enrolled in a college course that uses this text.
The book contains no study guide or solutions section and the frequent statement throughout the text is "proof of ... is left as an excercise." If you don't know the solutions before you read the text, then spend your money and time reading another book.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, not great
Review: I am currently using this book for an advanced Geometry class. The book works well in conjunction with a well taught class, which I thankfully have. The text contains a lot of information, although not all of the mathematical subtleties are brought to the readers attention, and are either left as exercises or for the student to ponder further. Greater analysis of deep and complex concepts would have been appreciated, and some answers to the problems would have been helpful as well -- the book contains none, which is a shame because the exercises are pretty good and are a requirement to master the material. I can understand why my professor likes this book, but it can be difficult to learn from if you haven't been exposed to the material before, and especially if you need to rely on it as a primary source of information.