Good textbooks for learning HL Math over the summer?

[melodrama_lorde]

Hey hey hey

I'm planning to get a head start on HL Math by working my way through a textbook over my summer break. I currently have PDFs of the Pearson textbook, Cambridge textbook, and H&H textbook. Which one is the best for a clear, thorough introduction to math for a person who is quite nervous about HL math and can a) explain the material clearly (I don't care if its a long explanation- it needs to be good), b) provide lots of practice questions and c) have challenging questions that can test my abilities, similar to ones on the exam? 

Or is there another textbook that is better?

merci beaucoup  

[Guest]

IBID Maths HL for the international baccalaureate. *IBID is the press. 

For maths it is better to have more than one textbooks. i personally have like 4 books (H&H is also nice and concise) and they did help me on getting a 7 in maths. 

Edited July 19, 2016 by Guest

[Vioh]

I have never used the H&H book, so I can't really comment on that. But I've used the Cambridge book (mostly for the option) and the Pearson book (mostly of the rest of the HL materials), and I'd say that they are both excellent textbooks. Pearson is more technical when it comes to explaining the concepts and providing theoretical understanding of the topic. But once you get used to its style, things become much easier and better because Pearson goes into more details compared to the Cambridge one. On the other hand, the Cambridge book is very beautiful with all the nice colours and neat highlight boxes, which makes it very entertaining to read.The thing that I particularly like about the Cambridge book is the "thinking box", which explains exactly how a student should be thinking when working on a question. I think that was very useful. The only downside of the Cambridge book is that there are not so many practice questions, and the practice questions in there are usually not too difficult. If you are unsure about which book to use, I think you should pick a chapter (say, trigonometric identities, for instance) and read that same chapter in all the 3 books that you have in order to decide which book you're most comfortable with.

One warning: Never use the Perason book for the options, because they were poorly written with tonnes of mistakes and all the materials being written in an overly-complicated manner.

You can also read more about the HL maths textbooks here in this discussion:

 

[lescrubgod]

From what I've heard Pearson tends to be the best at delivering in-depth explanations for each topic whereas the IBID book by IBID press provides really good questions that mirror the actual IB exam questions. I myself do not have access to the Pearson IB math hl book and would really appreciate it if you could share the link to it? Thanks.

[Rosalina]

On 2016-07-19 at 11:54 AM, Vioh said:

 

One warning: Never use the Perason book for the options, because they were poorly written with tonnes of mistakes and all the materials being written in an overly-complicated manner.

You can also read more about the HL maths textbooks here in this discussion.

Slightly off-topic but does the same apply for the Pearson IBDP guides for the sciences?

[Vioh]

@Rosalina I wouldn't be sure because the syllabi for all the sciences have been changed since I took the exams in 2014. Besides, I didn't use any guides for the sciences. For physics, I only used the Cambridge Tsokos textbook, and it was brilliant (actually, I believe that no other textbooks can match the quality of the Cambridge one for physics). So I'd suppose that the Cambridge guide is also brilliant. For chemistry, I felt that most textbooks are of the same quality. And since I took neither biology nor computer science, I can't really comment on those.