<p>I will be taking these 3 AP tests and am looking to purchase a book to review for each. calculus is the most important, hopefully I can get a combination book for the other two? if not, what books do you guys recommend to get a 5?</p>
<p>AP Calculus BC: Peterson’s or Princeton Review</p>
<p>AP US Gov: 5 Steps to a 5 or Princeton Review</p>
<p>AP Macro: 5 Steps to a 5 or Princeton Review</p>
<p>You need a textbook for Calc BC. No exceptions. Princeton Review seems to be only good for the practice tests in the back. You won’t learn anything from reading Princeton Review (its explanations for series suck especially, in my opinion).</p>
<p>I disagree. A textbook goes into far too much detail on series. Well, not too much detail, it just does too much ‘stuff’. For example, in my textbook it has example problems for using polynomial divison to divide taylor polynomials, which you won’t have to do on the AP test. Also it shows the Taylor series for the binomial series, which also is superfluous. The only thing that the Princeton book does not go over that thoroughly was the Alternating Series Error. For example, one of the practice problems was something like ‘What degree taylor polynomial is required to approxmiate sin(x) to within 0.001 accuray’ (it was worded something like that) and the explanation for the answer was just ‘The error is less then the next term, so n = 6’ or whatever it came out to be. I had to figure out on my own how the Alternating Series Error works. (Which actually I think figuring out how something works/teaching yourself makes you better at it than if someone else taught you or if you read it out of a book, but that’s just my opinion.)</p>
<p>So I’d say you really don’t need a Calc book, all you need is the Princeton Review. However it’s nice to have a Calc book for more practice problems, depth of explanation, etc, but I don’t think it’s necessary, it wasn’t for me.</p>