Customer Reviews

Calculus Early Transcendentals 5th Ed with CD (Calculus Early Transcendentals 5e (CD included))

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I teach high school level Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry. Calculus, Early Transcendentals, 5th edition, by James Stewart is an indispensable resource of accurate, cogent, understandable information for students. Unlike many calculus textbooks, its chapters are filled with pertinent problems applicable to solving real world scientific and engineering problems. The book encompasses three full semesters of college level calculus so most high school students, if forced to assimilate this book on their own, will feel overwhelmed by the enormous wealth of material. I commend the author for a monumental work and thank him for the help it provides educators and students alike. I recommend this book to any high school AP or college level calculus student interested in understanding and then applying the dynamic elegance of calculus to real world problems. It's nice to see this book on any calculus teacher's shelf. I see one principal drawback: the book progresses too rapidly for an average high school calculus student to tackle without a patient teacher.

I used this book for 3 consecutive calculus classes and the book was good when I had a good instructor who taught from the book. When I took the series III of calculus, I had a bad teacher who didn't teach from the book, and the examples in the book were not very helpful when it came time to do homework. I would strongly suggest getting the solutions manual if you have a crappy teacher, otherwise you'll get confused on how to solve the moderate to difficult problems.

First off, Stewart is really the Calculus book of choice in most universities nowadays, as well as many junior colleges. I think that mostly everyone who's buying the book on this website is doing so for a college or high school AP class, and so there's not much you can do to if you don't happen to like it. Therefore I will just discuss some of the issues that different types of students face when learning from Stewart.

The student experience with the included CDs are vary inconsistent, it saves some from failing, but others it only confuses more. For this reason I would encourage anyone who buys a book with an included CD to try it, but I don't think anyone should buy it for its own sake, or even spend a sizable amount more just to get a book that includes it.

As far as the actual text goes, the explanations are usually fairly candid and well written, but some of the examples tend to skip the necessary steps to show the novice student the method clearly. Sadly, the Student Solutions Manual is not much better, and I actually don't recommend it, since there is a complete worked solutions manual floating around in the torrents, which has fully worked solutions to every problem in the book. If you are interested in this you can always go to the TPB website and you'll probably get something, people uncomfortable with torrents are welcome to email me at adambruce93@gmail.com and I'll see if I can send you the files.

For the examples, the best thing you can do as a student to better understand them is go through the examples with a "pencil and paper." Which basically means work the problem with Stewart, and when there is a step in his explanation which you don't understand, think about it and try to figure out for yourself what he did. If you can't, you can always ask the professor at the lecture (you should read the day's section prior to the lecture for the best results). You'll probably think this terribly annoying, but I can assure you this will do wonders for your understanding, and will ultimately pay off (I personally scored a 5 on the AP test, and subsequently passed Calc-II and Calc-III with A's using this method).

The problem sets are usually pretty straight forward, but be warned that some of the later problems in any set are bound to be very difficult. In addition to this there are some "conceptual" sections in the book whose problems are intended to give the student a conceptual and many times geometrical understanding of what's happening. The problems for this are usually pretty annoying, and there is a lot of them at the beginning of the course, but rest assured, once you get to section 2.8 or so "regular" problem sets will reappear, only to have the annoying conceptual stuff pop up again once every so often.

Lastly, I would like to recommend some supplementary texts which are good where Stewart is weak. Anton, for example, has a great text, and is especially good at introducing the integral and integration. There is also a text called "Lectures on Freshmen Calculus" by Cruse and Granberg which is great if your looking for some extra explanation, although it only covers the material from the first two semesters of college calculus (all of AP calculus, both AB and BC). In addition to those the texts of Leithold and Munroe are worth a look.

Well there you have it. Good night and good luck.

I absolutely love this book!!! The condition of the book was exactly, what the company had said it would be in.

And, I also love several particular features of the many of this book, too.

For, example, one of the two included CD-ROM's: TEC ("Tools for Enriching Calculus"), contains 'TEC' modules, that are matched with corresponding icons in the book. And, are designed to enrich your understanding of calculus. It also contains 'Homework Hints' for representative exercises (whose numbers are printed in red), that are matched to the same exercise number in the textbook.

The other CD-ROM, "Interactive Video Skillbuilder," contains videos of instrutors explaining some of the examples in the text. And, also has Web quizzes and 'MathCue Tutorial' software.

And, lastly I really, really love the bonus of free online access, to the BCA/iLrn Student Version of the Calculus Early Transcendentals - Fifth Edition. Which, also includes another free bonus, that is called 'Mentor.' This particular product has an integrated learning environment for calculus that gives you: (1) Live one-on-one online help from a qualified instrutor throught 'vMentor.' And, (2) Quizzes to test your mastery. Also, a quick start guide (BCA/iLrn Student Quick Start Guide) located at [...], provides additional tips and assistance.

The thing with most textbooks is you have to be good at reading technical writing. His examples aren't the easiest to follow, but you can basically just teach yourself calculus with this book given you're not a high school student. It runs a little fast for a high school student, but I'm the type of student that only needs to see one example and read the explanation one or two times to learn. It may or may not fit your learning style because it is technical writing. The reviewers who are bashing the books don't seem to have tried to independently taken the time to learn the material straight from the book but instead rely on others to explain it in a way that is condensed and summarized such a teacher or notes. So understand before you buy this that it does take more patience than having it fed to you by someone else

Worst math book ever. Paul's Online Math Notes was easier to understand and had more information and that's FREE why any teacher would use this book is beyond me.