What are your recommended Maths HL textbooks to get a 7?
I'm a first-year IB student taking Maths HL and our class is currently using the Oxford textbook (the one with the purple flower on the cover). Personally, I find that the explanations/examples are lacking in this book which is a real problem since I practically have to self-study the subject because the teacher is crap. Also, lots of people say the questions in the Oxford book are a lot easier than the questions on the actual Maths HL exam. I have every Maths HL textbook on PDF so getting them won't be a problem. I just haven't gotten the time to reference any other book besides the Oxford one since the class progresses really fast. Please leave your textbook recommendations below and your thoughts on other textbooks in the hellish realm of Maths HL. Thank you in advance!
I haven't looked at the Oxford books that much but I use Haese. It describes the topics moderately well and has a large focus on example problems and review problems. The "review sets" at the end of each chapter are especially useful because they help you consider freely what methods to use to solve the problem. Granted, no problems ever match up to the IB exams as the IB comes out with a practically new type of question every year (lookin at you stats and calc questions). Regardless, it has been a good starting point for me.
Haese is what I used, and is useful as a starting point (it provides more details on problems), but you'd really want to start on some past paper questions to get a proper feel for the IB exams. There's no need to actually leave doing them until just before the exams. Try doing a few questions a day from old past papers (the syllabus hasn't changed that much over the years as far as I know). You can leave some of the more recent ones as mocks in the few months before the exams.
Do you know where to get the past papers? Are there topic-based past papers?
They can be purchased from the IBO, or alternatively you can search online (e.g. IBO subreddit). There aren't topic-based past papers, but the IB Question Banks should suffice for that. You could also just pick problems you know from past papers.