Customer Reviews

Bob Miller's Calc for the Clueless: Calc III

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After the stress of Taylor and Sequential Calculus in Calculus II, I assumed that the Calculus of several variables would be trivial. In essence, it was. However, the prohibition of calculator usage, coupled with the oddities of 3-D drawing made Calculus III a little more difficult. However, Bob Miller came to the rescue! With his relaxed prose style and user-friendly interface, Stokes, Gauss, and the like became quite simple. I was also concurrently in a Matrix Theory course, and his review of the idea of the R^n field and Abelian rules helped clarify other issues. All he needs now is to write a Linear Algebra book!

There are a lot of good ideas and good teaching methods in this book, but there are way too many typos for a technical book: things like subscripts, variables, or parentheses missing. And there are misspellings (like Stoke's theorem instead of Stokes's theorem). It's a great idea for a book ruined by lousy proofreading. Maybe the errors will be corrected in a 2nd edition.

Bob Miller takes very difficult concepts and makes them extremely easy to grasp. It is the one math book that will not make you tear your hair out of your head!
The author uses a bit of humor and emotion to make math understandable to the average layman. The books are meant to be a supplement to whatever math text you are using. After Bob explains the concepts you will breeze through your textbook's examples. A great book at a great price!

very easy to understand - very informative discriptions -

In Calc III, the very first example has a mathematical typo! I spent ten minutes going crazy, not understanding how he reached his answer. The midpoint between 3 and -4 on the z axis is not and can never be -3.5!

Got this book to help me study for my Math103 (calc 3 in duke notation) final, and it really serves no purpose. In the author's attempts to make calculus "easy" he ignores many many things that are important if one is to do well in calc 3 (or at least calc 3 as it is taught here). I've just started going through the book, and have only covered vectors and quadric surfaces, but the book has already completely skipped on covering the "universal" formula for distance between 2 things, as well as not covering curvature, the components of acceleration... I can only imagine how much more the author skips later on. I realize that the author could not satisfy the requirements for every calc3 class at every college, but come on: this is stuff that comes straight from what is probably the most used calculus text, Edwards + Penney. If you have a decent textbook for your calc3 class, you're better of just taking the time to study from it : you'll end up in much better shape.

I enjoyed the book, it gave a good description even to a first year college student like myself. I feel I've gained great insight to the world of mathmatics. thanks joe