Essential Trigonometry

Book excerpt: This no-nonsense guide provides students and self-learners with a clear and readable study of trigonometry's most important ideas. Tim Hill's distraction-free approach combines decades of tutoring experience with the proven methods of his Russian math teachers. The result: learn in a few days what conventional schools stretch into months. - Teaches general principles that can be applied to a wide variety of problems. - Avoids the mindless and excessive routine computations that characterize conventional textbooks. - Treats trigonometry as a logically coherent discipline, not as a disjointed collection of techniques. - Restores proofs to their proper place to remove doubt, convey insight, and encourage precise logical thinking. - Omits digressions, excessive formalities, and repetitive exercises. - Covers all the trigonometry needed to take a calculus course. - Includes problems (with all solutions) that extend your knowledge rather than merely reinforce it. Contents 1. A Few Basics 2. Radian Measure 3. The Trig Functions 4. Trig Values for Special Angles 5. Graphs of Trig Functions 6. The Major Formulas 7. Inverse Trig Functions 8. The Law of Cosines (and Sines) 9. Solutions 10. Trig Cheat Sheet