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Book Reviews
Our personal evaluation of different AP study books
Barron's, 14th Edition
The Barron’s review book is useful for content review. The text is easy to read, and the book bolds important vocabulary terms. The margins are wide enough to write notes. Barron’s review book includes AB as well as BC content. The book sometimes goes more in-depth than the exam does, but having more information is better than having less. Barron’s also clearly labels which topics are BC only. However, the practice tests and other multiple choice questions have five answer choices while the actual AP exam has four. This is the case for the newest edition, the 14th edition. Barron’s may fix this in the future as the calculus exam was just updated to have four answer choices.
Princeton Review, 2017 Edition
The Princeton Review edition has a book that is solely AB calculus, but it also has a BC edition that includes series, polar and parametric, and arc length. The book has a very comprehensive overview of all topics in calculus and does go into a lot of detail, so if you plan on going through the entire book, make sure to leave yourself enough time. Princeton Review starts with a practice test so each user can see where they stand in terms of score and what topics to focus on. Within each section, there are a few practice problems specifically on that topic and after all of the review content, the book does include a few more practice exams. Princeton Review has equal amounts of space allocated for all the sections, which is not as necessary for easier topics from the beginning of the year, but they could allocated more content review and questions to harder topics, such as series. Overall, Princeton Review a very good review tool.