good, but i preferred the first edition
This is a good geometry book, but not as wonderful as the first edition.
Visually it is more colorful, but intellectually it is less appealing.
I had liked th...
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good, but i preferred the first edition
This is a good geometry book, but not as wonderful as the first edition.
Visually it is more colorful, but intellectually it is less appealing.
I had liked the cartoons, the geometry topics I did not learn in high school, and the entertaining and useful introduction to logic chapter 1. My 8 year old son also found it fun and accessible. The cartoons do not seem as witty in their new placement, the interesting Heron's theorem is banished to the exercises, Pythagoras for different shapes has also been augmented with hints for the dull reader, p.419, and and the wonderful logic lesson in chapter 2 is almost entirely gone.
The ilustrations, cartoons, and discussions, no longer seem designed to make one think. This de - emphasis on thinking, and increased stress on color pictures, make this edition resemble the "highlights for children" magazines my mother loved for our kindergarten class. If your goal is to teach geometry to say a third grade class (and I would applaud that), then maybe this is a good choice, but for high schoolers, I recommend you try to find the earlier editions.
Compare the proof of SSS, in Jacobs 3rd edition, page 164, to that of Euclid, prop. 4 book one, to see the cost of omitting rigid motions.
I am being critical here of a well written work, but I am not so much comparing Jacobs to other competing books, where it stands very high, but to its own previous versions, which were decidedly superior in intellectual quality for an intelligent high school student. Having known and loved the older version, this one is a disappointment, the moreso since something rare and wonderful has been lost.