<p>My friends and I are starting a little study group...we want books that can help us??? Any recommendations???</p>
<p>Collegeboard's Official SAT Study guide is the best review book, so I've been told.</p>
<p>College Board is the best for getting to know the test. If you need to learn stuff, go with Barron's or PR.</p>
<p>Oh god, there are too many of these threads. . . . All of those big-name brands suck. The BB is must, because it has practice tests. For strategy, go with Maximum SAT, RR, or Gruber's.</p>
<p>Godfatherbob, Barron's, while a big name, is actually really good.</p>
<p>What exactly is BB?</p>
<p>BB is the official study book from collegeboard.com. It is a giant blue book</p>
<p>RocketReview is great for studying CR and Writing.</p>
<p>I think Grammatix is way better than RR in terms of CR. The strategies are far more straightforward and effective</p>
<p>^ Maybe for Cr, but I don't believe writing is as effective. Of course, Grammatix does seem to offer some exercises/strategies that tend to make you feel enlightened in terms of how you approach your CR passages and questions. Rocket Review is pretty efficient for writing. It tends to make the CR part convoluted and overextended. Its content would probably confuse you and destroy your ego (especially the diagnostic/sample passages about telescopes). I don't think the SAT would go to such lengths to trick you with such convoluted wordings and sentence structure (well not as much as RR). For Math, definitely stick to Gruber's. It's comprehensive and it has all you need.</p>
<p>All those big brand names mostly offer rehashed and "revised" editions of the same thing. Kaplan wrote its SAT book without even looking at the SAT content.</p>
<p>Well, I feel that except for the Essay, all parts in Rocket Review are unnecessarily lengthened and therefore very difficult to digest. The author's strategies may be good but he seems to have alienated many impatient readers (incl. me) by his verbosity. </p>
<p>About Grammatix, b/c I haven't read the whole book, I just want to have some words on the Writing section. The strategies for Writing multiple choice questions are far superior to those of any other prep books. After adopting the methods in Grammatix wholeheartedly, I see a considerable improvement in my raw score. The essay part is good as well. Admittedly, I always got stuck with the introductory paragraph of any essay until I read Grammatix. I don't apply all the guidelines though, just the intro and the conclusion only, b/c the body para. is very ill-written for my liking</p>
<p>From my experience...Princeton Review Cracking the SAT is the best book to start with. The overview of the test and the strategies are very helpful. The practice tests were close to the real test for me. For just practice, you have to do the College Board tests, but they don't come with answer explanations or strategies, so you need the PR book too.</p>