Product Description

• Features concise, student-friendly Core books in full colour to ease the challenging transition from GCSE and A Level.
• Written in a manageable, accessible style to help students find the step up to A Level less daunting.
• Endorsed by Edexcel, the author team includes experienced Senior Examiners to provide students with what they need to succeed.
• Truly exam-focused, the textbooks offer plenty of revision exercises, worked examples and practice questions to help students prepare fully for the examinations.
• Provides thorough coverage, to the right depth, of all the topics needed for the new specification.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #195480 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Inadequate explanation
I have recently read this book and completed most of the exercises with the intention of brushing up my mathematics, that has over the years become very rusty.

I agree with the sentiment of the previous reviewers. There is very little material in the book that actually teaches the mathematics required. I have merely been using the book as a set of exercises to do, as I should in theory know how to do them.

Many of the exercises are extremely easy and can be done using knowledge gained from the few examples that illustrate the concepts. However there are some questions that are very difficult and cannot be done using only material in the book. So, older books such as Bostock and Chandler are very useful to have around as reference.

Some of the questions involve topics that are not in the FP1 syllabus, indeed they are not in the A-level or Further Maths A-level anymore. One of the questions involving differential equations involved a knowledge of half-angle formulae. This use to be in the A-level when I took it in 1974, but I cannot find any reference to it in the Edexcel syllabus, nor any of the Core Pure books - in particular C3 where I would expect to find it.

I also made a discovery, that suggest that these books represent a hasty cut-and-paste of older versions of this book. Various references are made to older versions of the books rather than the new series.
e.g p24 (multiplying one complex number by another - You must apply the rules of algebra. These were demonstrated in book P1 chapter 1. Also in the same chapter there is a reference to book P6.

As a textbook it has severe limitations. With a good teacher it can be an adequate preparation for the FP1 exam. I am glad to report that there are very few mistakes in the answers at the back of the book. At least they agree with my answers.

Awfully writen
I tried to use this book alone, without a teacher. I was totally disapointed. The theory was far from well-explained, there were only few examples to illustrate the theory,the exercises were too difficult to handle with such a poor explanation. Having used all the other books of the series, this book didn't live up to my expectations at all.

Not very helpful on its own
I used this book to teach myself FP1. Whilst the Heinemann Edexcel books for Core 1 to 4 provide a reasonable amount of explanation, it is distinctly lacking in this one. It does have plenty of questions, but with no Solution bank to provide detailed answers, you are on your own if your answer is different to the one in the back! I found the old Bostock and Chandler text books to be useful as a back up and will be looking for the books from other exam boards to supplement this one.