2008-03-03 Just dreadful - Schools: Don't buy - Students: Get a CGP one

I am currently studying on the EdExcel science GCSE course, and I have to say, the quality of this book is appalling. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy "science", but this book it just dreadful.

Personal complaints:
1. Book content doesn't always match the exam. Often the exam asks about things which havn't even been mentioned in the book, or have been quashed in a little table to the side and made to look unimportant when actually it is important to learn.
2. Random pictures on many pages irrelevant to the topic, or have been bashed together poorly. For example, there's a picture on a page of some random guy, and the caption under it is something like "X cares about X". They may as well have gone round London for a day taking photos of the general public.
3. Poorly written in general
4. Boring, Especially the questions
5. ActiveBook CD throws an error before crashing on one of my PCs (Though I think this is a 1 off). Still, poor programming
6. SIMILAR QUESTIONS ARE REPEATEDLY ASKED OVER AND OVER AGAIN THROUGH WHOLE CHAPTERS
7. Who ever wrote this clearly spent a couple of days touring Britain and then tried to make a whole book about it. For example, Hockerton spreads over about 8 pages - 8 pages of slightly different images with slightly different captions under them.

In short, this is EdExcel selling a poorly written book for commercial reasons only. Point 6 has to be one of the easiest to spot examples of poor writing. There are much better books around in this topic such as as CGP ones.