GRE Books Advice

Based on my experience of the test, here are the books and exercises that I would recommend:

1. Barron's How to Prepare for the GRE : If you are going to take GRE my bet is you must have this book. Both verbal and quantitative sections are superb. Verbal section also features a vocabulary list which is widely popular and most of the words asked in the exam do fall from them. Quantitative section covers all the mathematic skills needed in the test. Analytical Writing section in this book just gives tips and ways on organizing your essays. But for writing I guess practice is more important than a book. So employ techniques given in this book and practice writing essay a lot.

2. Nova's GRE Prep Course: I didn't like verbal section myself but quantitative section is good. I recommend going through the quantitative section in this book. Exercises are similar to those that appear in the real test.

3. GRE Big Book: This book used to be published by ETS but now its out of print. It's good for verbal section because there are lots of practice exercises and the great thing is that those exercises were from real tests in the past. So it would be good to find this book and practice. But quantitative section is too easy for real GRE today. So use this book for practicing the verbal section.

These are the best three books that are enough for preparing the GRE. But I would recommend you to go through Kaplan, Princeton Review and Arco if you can get thise. If you can't buy these book, no problem. But I would strongly recommend you to get their frequent word lists and go through it.

Regarding the essay, you can get a book with sample essays but I won't recommend that. Best thing to do is to practice so get the tips from books like Barron and practice as much as you can.Check this ETS page for benchmarking the essay you have written :-

Samples of Scored Issue Essays with Reader's Commentaries

Samples of Scored Argument Essays with Reader's Commentaries