McKeague Trigonometry---has anyone used this

[dovrar]

If anyone has used the McKeague trig. text could you please tell me what you think of the text? I was looking at reviews on amazon and saw the following review:

 

 

...The sections that explain the material make the concepts seem reasonable. Then the authors throw the nasty problems at you. Its like the professor showing you Clifford the Big Red Dog and then the homework is from War and Peace. Entirely two different planets. The authors skip steps, don't show some examples entirely, and do a poor job of explaining anything. To make things worse, they skipped over and glossed over Identities entirely, there are no answers in the back of the book for those sections to guide you along, and the solutions manual is yet another overpriced piece of crap they want you to buy.

 

Would you agree?

 

Also, which edition did you use? The review didn't seem to be specific to any one edition.

 

Thanks so much!

[kiana]

I have a copy but it's not with me now. If you still need to know in a couple of weeks, pm me. I was favorably impressed at the time but didn't end up teaching out of it. 

 

But these kinds of reviews are often left by students who are expecting the homework to be 'do the same thing as the example, but fill in the blanks with different numbers'. I would be willing to bet that 'don't show some examples entirely' means 'there was homework that did not exactly match an example'. 

 

It is not possible to give 'the answer' for a trig identity any more than it is to give 'the answer' for any other kind of proof. It is very common for any kind of precalculus/trigonometry textbook to not put those in the brief answers in the back and rather reserve them for the solutions manual. This is not a legitimate complaint.