Customer Reviews

Calculus (With Analytic Geometry)(8th edition)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have been a fan of Roland Larson's math textbooks, as they have always been very clear and the practice problems always make sense. I was recently stuck in some calculus courses which used the calculus textbook by James Stewart, and that book is a nightmare! Fortunately, my multivarible calc prof prefers Larson's book, which is what we use in class. Very good book; I recommend it much over Stewart's. Also, do note that the odd-exercise solutions are posted for free online at Roland Larson's website, which is given to you in the book.

I used this book for Calc I and II.
The pre-calculus sections cover everything that you need for the calculus you'll be doing in the book.
If the pre-calc section didn't cover something you'll need in one of the 'real' chapters, the book covers it in the beginning section of that chapter.
Everything is organized well (in my opinion).
I do agree that the way some of the lessons are explained are sometimes hard to understand but all you need to do is fight through it to try to understand. If you still can't understand, just start trying the homework & the examples & you should be able to catch on.

Some classmates were complaining that it didn't review for Trig as much as it should've (you really need to have the special angle (30/60/90, 45/45/90) concepts memorized (or at least have the sin,cos & tan of the special angles memorized), however, I do remember the author adding additional sections in the appendix that covered the Trig you need to know for the course.
So make sure to check the appendix, it may have something you possibly need.

Overall, I really liked the book.
I highly recommend the H Anton book for Calc III though.
I had a really applicational calc III teach that NEVER did examples & never taught anything from the book.
He'd constantly go off on a tangent teaching applicational stuff that was very interesting, however, it did nothing for us in regards to the stuff we needed to learn for the class.
The H Anton book basically taught me the entire calc III material w/o a teacher.
The way it was written made it so you didn't really need a teacher.
If you're taking calc III, I definitely recommend the H Anton book (get it used though, don't pay high price based on my review. Not all books are for everyone, just b/c I liked it doesn't mean you would).

I bought this book for a Calc II course and found it to be excellent. The explanations, for the most part, are good, as are the diagrams and graphics, which make it very readable. Some of the explanations are more convoluted than necessary but these are the exception, not the rule. I would agree with the reviewer who said that the topics do not change - I have one of Larson's earlier textbooks and compared the two one day to find most of the exact same problems! All in all, a good book though. The website is great.

This book clearly explains the different mathematical techniques of Calculus and provides great problems for practice. It shows a step-by-step process of how to perform different techniques and explains how and why they work, which is probably the most important facet of actually learning calculus. In other words, it breaks down a daunting subject into something easy to understand.

I'm a physics and mathematics major at Northern Arizona University, and needed a calculus text that would supplement the three semesters of introductory calculus and make for a great long term reference. This is the book I was looking for. Through calculus I, II, and III I used this book to go over the concepts we learned in class to gain a better understanding of the material, and see more concrete examples. The concepts were clearly written, broken down to understand intuitively, and, if you're like me and enjoy precision, the rigor is there as well.

I've seen a few reviews complaining of the technical and abstract sections of the book. I would like to stress that the book is first and foremost about gaining an intuitive and deep understanding of the material--not to give quixotic proofs of everything under the sun.

If you would rather imitate like a monkey and just pound numbers into formulas and follow cookie cutter recipes to get to the answer without true understanding, you can learn to do that from this book (like any other calculus or engineering book). But if you want a deep lucid knowledge of calculus, this book provides it.

Calculus is an old problem, but new editions of the same material keep coming up. Calculus will not change, the way it is presented and explained can. At least to a certain amount. But just changing the sequence of exercise-numbers for each section, and moving sections from one chapter into another chapter, does not -in my opinion-warrant a new edition.
The actual text is the same as the old edition except: chapter 6 has 2 new sections (2 sections from the "old" chapter 5 have been moved to chapter 6).This is the only reason why I still gave it one star.
My opinion about this book: The way college students are tricked out of money for books they actually don't need is absolutely unethical! As a student you can only hope that your professor will work with online tools such as "eduspace". The fee to get access to the site is MUCH more reasonable....If you are not a student and are interested in this book: ANY of the old editions will give you the exact same information about Calculus!

This book is pretty solid. I am learing Calculus for the first time and have been very pleased with the format and descriptions. I like that there are bios of people who have contributed to the foundation of Calculus as well. Examples are strong as well. My only gripe would be that some of the examples skip steps, but it's mostly algebra related so I would reccomend a either a strong algebra backround, or also have a source to go to when you need assistance with algebra.

great book with plenty of visualizations and examples. i do recommend keeping this book after your calculus classes if you end up taking differential equations and partial differential equations, as well as your engineering classes too.

Larson and Hostetler's math textbooks are the best available, hands down. The calculus text is no exception. With clear pedagogy, lucid explanations, carefully graded problem sets, and concrete applications, the 8th edition of Calculus is simply the best calculus book available. Period.

This book does provide the concepts and theory critical to an understanding of calculus. Unfortunately, it is in a wordy, technical, abstract, and thoroughly annoying format. I used this book for calculus 1, 2, and 3. However, unlike my classmates, I learned all the material from an engineering math book (Kenneth Stroud, "Engineering Mathematics").This book gives you plenty of abstract proofs that look like bull@!#t, but falls far short of my engineering book in encouraging an elementary understanding of calculus. This book gives numerous lifeless formulas to boggle the readers' mind, instead of a relative few like my engineering book, and the latter sews the subject into a more memorable whole . Most importantly, I can create these formulas if I need to, because I actually UNDERSTAND what is going on. By the way, I got an A+ in all courses, and I never bothered to learn the epsilon delta crap.

For those reviewers that question my dislike of this book, and especially my use of strong language concerning its use of epsilon delta proofs, the below will help to clarify my position.

When first learning the Calculus I believe that an intuitive grasp of the derived formulas and their applications should be emphasized; Calculus was invented for solving physical problems (mainly Mechanics), and it seems that this intuitive understanding is largely cast aside by beginning works that employ the abstract epsilon-delta formulation. I'm learning Real Analysis and Mathematical Logic now with little difficulty, largely because I beforehand developed my intuitive grasp of mathematics, instead of getting bogged down by theory at the beginning. The interested reader may want to read Morris Kline's "Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach" for a more complete argument on this pedagogical style. It has been stated by great mathematicians, and I believe it, that had many of the great inventors of the Calculus felt it necessary to heed something similar to the modern day call for absolute rigor, often so utterly devoid of natures inspirations, their work would have been greatly stunted by it. My post applies to this work as a supposed beginning Calculus textbook; I still believe that there are better books for this purpose, for both the Science and Mathematics major: there is time for Real Analysis later.