Joseph Bak

I had to use this book for my course in Complex Variables at the University of Iowa. I got an A in the course, but I did not find this book to be helpful. The book does not appear to be used often enough for there to be a solution guide online, but I was able to find these homework problems discussed in online forums and sometimes on the course websites of other universities.

There are solutions to about half of the problems in the back, but only the answer is given [for example: (+/-) (1+3i)], which tells you whether or not you were correct, but it does not tell you where you went wrong in your several pages of work. If you don't know how to solve the problem, the solution alone is not helpful.

The examples given in the book are also not helpful. They always skip over many steps, and it took me at least 30 minutes to reconstruct all the missing steps in order to figure out what the book examples were trying to say. In addition, many of the examples give no explanation at all; they merely list an example problem and its solution. Without showing how to solve the problem, the book does not help you learn how to solve problems for your exams and homework.

Because of these problems, I rarely used this book in my course. I completed homework problems from the book each week, but I used online sources to figure out how to solve the problems. I used this book mainly to check that my answers were correct.… (plus d'informations)