"Everything You Need to Know to Ace <subject> in One Big Fat Notebook." Opinions?

[Janeway]

My son, 12 almost 13 yrs old, wanted all these books when we saw them at Costco. But we already have books like "Everything You Need to Know About..." and a variety of other books of that flavor. It feels to me like these books are just going to add most "stuff" to our house. For some reason, he says he really wants them (but I know him and he has been known to want something for the purpose of just owning something). 

Any opinions of these books?

[SilverMoon]

They're good. You could easily use them as a spine and build a course around them. I like the science and history ones better than the Usborne encyclopedias. 

My 11yo is using the middle school math workbook from this line for light summer math. It's been fabulous for our purposes but it wouldn't do at all for a core curriculum. 

 

Fwiw my 18yo was like this with flight/airplane books. "But this one has ThisPlane and ThatPlane that the others don't have!" Or, "This one has amazing line drawings!" Even though he's long outgrown wanting to be a pilot, he still has all of those books and considers them treasures. He and the books were worth it. No regrets. 🙂

[smfmommy]

Of the ones we have looked at, English was our least favorite.  It just didn't flow as well.  I could read aloud the others, including math, and while they weren't what I would call conversational they still flowed better than the English one.  Our library has them, maybe you could try before you buy?

 

[pmeilaen]

I think the high school ones for biology and chemistry are very good for a student who is not a science person.

[Vida Winter]

I have the middle school math and computer science book - for what they are they're pretty good! Definitely not deep but thorough. The math book has a lot of basic definitions and examples of common math problems. The CS book goes into Scratch programming about halfway through. I often use them to get teaching ideas.