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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Frustration Maxima,
By Frustrated Mom (Texas) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Calculus: Graphical, Numerical, and Algebraic (Hardcover)
This text has simple examples that are only moderately easy to follow. The problems, on the other hand, are extremely difficult. There is no bridge between the two. The index is not particularly good. The explanations are obscure. The text spends too much time on theory that I suppose is interesting to mathematicians, but just gets in the way of learning about derivatives and integrals and their uses. I truly detest this book and find it a misery to deal with. My child's teacher was sick for the first half of the year, so I was thrust into the breach. I graduated from college magna cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa key, I took Calculus and made an A (many years ago), I am a CPA with an MBA. My difficulties were not because I am dumb and not because I wasn't trying.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Hated it as a student, but it's a good book,
This review is from: Calculus: Graphical, Numerical, and Algebraic (Hardcover)
I used this textbook when I took AP Calculus. I recall not liking it very much -- my mathematics preparation was poor, and I struggled to understand the precise statements of definitions and theorems. It didn't help that at the time I was only concerned with what would be on the AP exam, naively believing that a 5 on the AP course represented mastery of an equivalent college course.
Revisiting this book years later, having taken college math classes where it's sink or swim -- and you sink if you don't read the textbook -- I appreciate this book a lot more. It is fairly rigorous but never too much so, and there are plenty of practice problems and examples. My only regret is not actually reading this book when I was in high school. Like many calculus students, I went into the AP exam very skilled at doing AP problems, but I didn't truly understand calculus. I could compute integrals or solve related rates problems with the best of them, but I wouldn't stand a chance if anyone were to press me on my foundations (luckily, the AP Calc exam didn't). It didn't help that my teacher knew very little calculus himself and let theory fall by the wayside in favor of computation. I hope that current AP Calculus students learn from my mistake and take things like the Mean Value Theorem and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus seriously -- this book proves these theorems carefully, but it's all too easy to skip the proofs and jump to the examples. I was not alone in finding this book difficult to read as a high school student -- my classmates then and my students now have expressed similar opinions. However, this text is much more informal and accessible than any mathematics text I used in college. Being able to read technical exposition on one's own is probably the most important preparation one can have for college, and the exposition in this textbook is fairly user friendly. Students will struggle at first if they, like me, are accustomed to being spoonfed formulas by their math teachers. Nonetheless, this book is accessible enough that a mature high school student who is not used to reading math textbooks CAN pick up the skill by reading it carefully. As much as I find the explanations in this textbook perfectly clear now, I realize that it is easy to find something clear when you already understand it. I can sympathize with the high schooler who is seeing power series for the first time and trying to understand the terse explanations and notational subtleties in this text. Some of the concepts are crudely explained, and the book gets too carried away with graphical arguments at times. The ridiculous number of "try graphing this to see..." investigations come at the cost of additional examples and clarifications for students who actually want to use the text as a reference. I also don't understand why certain homework problems are marked as "Work in groups of two or three" when they seem no more conducive to groupwork than other problems. The quality and depth of the coverage of topics vacillates. Ch. 1 reviews relevant algebra and pre-calculus topics, and is well-suited for summer work. Limits in Ch. 2 is treated exceptionally poorly -- the book provides the standard theorems about limits, but it fails to discuss any techniques for evaluating limits that are computationally useful. The limits in the exercises can be evaluated by direct substitution! Where, then, are students supposed to learn that you can cancel common factors in the numerator and denominator when evaluating limits -- a technique that is imperative for computing a derivative from the definition? Chapters 3 and 4 do a great job of introducing the student to derivatives and then their applications, and Ch. 5 is an excellent treatment of the theory behind the Riemann integral. Ch. 6, however, is where it begins to fall apart. The chapter is titled "Differential Equations and Mathematical Modeling," but its sections include "Integration by Substitution" and "Integration by Parts," which don't seem particularly relevant to differential equations -- or mathematical modeling, for that matter. I would have preferred that these techniques of integration be grouped with the others, such as partial fractions and trig substitution, which somehow ended up in Chapter 8. Ch. 8 is another oddball -- what exactly is the unifying element of a chapter entitled "L'Hopital's Rule, Improper Integrals, and Partial Fractions"? It's almost as if the authors realized at the last minute that they forgot to cover these three topics and threw them into one chapter. I am nitpicking, and really, I do quite like this book. It doesn't try to dumb down the math like some recent calculus textbooks (I especially like the appendix on epsilon-deltas!), and the exposition is quite clear. Nonetheless, this book would be much improved if it abandoned the gimmicks, stuck to the math, and presented the material in a more methodical fashion.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid book, but lack of explanations,
By
This review is from: Calculus: Graphical, Numerical, and Algebraic (Hardcover)
a very nice book if you are using it in a course, but not a good choice for self learning. The contents are solid but lack of explanations.
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