Customer Reviews

Calculus (Stewart's Calculus Series)

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I am a college Calculus instructor, and I find this book terrible for many reasons. For students looking for a solid but much more inviting introduction to Calculus, I highly recommend Larson's book over Stewart's.

Here is a point-by-point breakdown of the faults I find in Stewart's text:

Clarity of Explanation and Content Level

Stewart's explanations are often verbose, unclear, and written at a
level too high for the average Calculus student. Several of my students
have told me reading the book only confused them and did not
clarify the concepts. An introductory text should offer simpler, clearer, and more concise explanations more appropriate to the typical Calculus student.

Presentation

In this day and age, students expect visually engaging presentations that will hold their attention. Stewart's presentations are drab and uninteresting. His book is everywhere packed with dense plain text and
formulas, giving the impression that Calculus is hard, dull, and very
complex, further intimidating students who are already scared of the
subject. Students are much more likely to carefully read a text that is
visually appealing and makes Calculus seem interesting and less
intimidating. This will also help reduce their anxiety over what many
already consider a very difficult course.


Readability

Another important aspect of presentation is layout and readability. Here
Stewart's text is again dismal: His pages are overstuffed with text and
graphics throughout the book, making it difficult to reference a
theorem, particular type of example, etc. It is hard to see where one
example or proof ends and another begins. The average student is not
going to read the entire contents of a section in full detail, but will
rather reference the topics s/he is having trouble with, in order to get
the details on a theorem or to find an example problem to help with a
homework exercise. This is very difficult to do in Stewart's text due to
the crowded and confusing layout.

Homework Exercises

Stewart's text is again particularly poor in terms of his homework sets in that he tends to offer a few low-level problems and then suddenly jump into extraordinarily difficult problems with no warning or transition. Stewart also tends to couch exceedingly difficult problems between a series of relatively straightforward ones, again without warning, which is very frustrating for students who find themselves struggling over what they think is an easy problem.

All in all, I strongly advise against this text, and would urge other Calculus instructors and mathematics departments to choose another Calculus book for their classes.

I taught Multivariable Calculus using this book as a TA. You will learn multivariable calculus, it's just as good as any other calculus text but with two major problems!

1) It does Taylor no justice! The multivariable version of the Taylor Approximation is absent. The author mentions linearizing a given function [of two variables] and thats it! C'mon! This is such an important aspect of math, physics, engineering, etc... why drop it?

2) The chapter on Gauss' Theorem, Stokes Theorem (Green's as well), and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is poor, it provides little by way of intuitively understanding these integral theorems. As an added bonus (sarcasm), students, I find, have a harder time geometrically and physically understanding what the Curl and Divergence of vector fields represent! This is most unfortunate, especially for future physicists and engineers!

There are books out there that would complement Stewart on this: "Div, Grad, Curl, And All That" by Schey is one of them; the book written by Marsden and Tromba is also a good place to go for both the integral theorems and the Taylor Polynomial.

Other than this unfortunate turn of events, Stewart IS a good book. I do recommend Thomas' Calculus instead - the problem with that (as well as with Stewart) is that the price is so high. Get an older edition, you won't be missing much, you'll only gain insight and an appreciation for calculus as an undergrad.

This book is great to teach and to learn from. This book can save you money at some schools as this edition of the book can cover Calculus I, II, and III; you could end up spending over $300 if you buy the two volume edition of the book.

This book does great job explaining most lessons and concepts. The examples are detailed and the proofs are sometimes done in two different ways that will make you more interested in the math than you probably did before.

What I also like about this book is how all the sections seems to come together and magnify. For example section 9.1 and 14.3 are both on Arc Length, but one is in two dimensions and the other is in three dimensions. The presentation of both perspectives will make you think on how to think twice on the same situation. The weirder thing about it is there are 3 more ways to get the same number! lol.

A great read and investment.

How this book is rated depends on one factor: Do you want to learn calculus? If you do, then this book is excellent. Read each section twice while carefully thinking about what is going on. I will say that a small percentage of the exercises are difficult, not because the concepts are difficult, but because it can be hard to know how to set the problem up and because students forget trigonometry or algebra. Find the Instructor Solutions Manual and use these harder exercises and all the project questions to enhance your understanding of the subject, not to obsess over for hours because you can't figure it out. If you don't get a problem within a reasonable amount of time, simply look at the solution and fully understand how it was arrived at.

If you don't like math AND you don't want to learn it, this book will torture you, maybe more than other texts, at least for Calc 2 and Calc 3.

I had this book for Calculus I, II, and III. It does a decent job at explaining everything and there are some good exercises in the book. If you actually read through the chapters, you will find yourself picking things up easier, and there are great examples in the reading.

This is probably as good as you are going to get in a Undergraduate Calculus text. I find myself going back to it every now and again to refresh my knowledge.

One of the best college calculus textbooks. Lots of clear examples and many problems. Complete text for three semesters of college math.

This book is very large, quite heavy and burdensome to carry around. It is very useful and provides helpful examples to explain concepts.

It's a great book for studying Calculus. The book has many wonderful problems from easy to moderate and hard to challenge you.
It has several differences with another book but same author, "Calculus 6E Early Transcendentals." Many college use the "Calculus Early Transcendentals," so you have to check with your instructor before you buy it. The difference is in Chapter 2,3, and 7, and the author takes out one chapter from the Calculus Series. It's ok if you want to use this book for multi-variable calculus because there is no difference in this part of this book.

This book thoroughly explains everything clearly, offers great examples, and good homework problems. The student solutions manual that accompanies it is awesome. After taking 2 courses in calculus with this book after using a different one for calc 1, this book became a treasure and is one of the best books i own.

Corollary: As the number of pretty pictures in a textbook increases, the beauty of the explanations declines.

Stewart's Theorem has become painfully obvious to many undergrads forced to pay a massive amount of money for a bulky book that causes endless confusion and heartache. I knew more than one person who needlessly changed their major because they found calculus so confusing, thanks to Dr. Stewart. He should have paid closer attention to his mentor, the legendary pedagogue George Polya, while he was attending Stanford. I was never good enough to get into Stanford, and yet I could explain calculus well enough that a few students were able to remain in a scientific/engineering discipline, even though Stewart was their text. Go figure.

Can I add any criticism to what's been said? Hardly, except perhaps to upbraid mathematics department heads who collude with textbook publishers to foist over-priced books on cash-strapped students. There are many good mathematics, science, and engineering books available from Dover books for very little cost. But you'll never, ever see a Dover book in a university bookstore (I'll send fifty bucks to anyone who can find a counterexample!) That's the reason why your college president earns the income of a corporate CEO. He knows how to play ball with people who matter. (And if you're a student, that isn't you, no matter what they tell you at orientation.)

I will admit that Stewart does give some very interesting and entertaining problems in the advanced sections, although any student who might want to do them will probably be too befuddled to tackle them. An advanced student looking to refine his or her skills will actually find some valuable material here, but if you're a novice, beware. This book is really as bad as everyone says--Amazon doesn't allow profanity, so you can't describe it properly in English.

To the beginner, I'd like to say: Do not despair. Calculus is a delightful subject, and if you've got a good guide (upperclassmen in physics, engineering, and math are particulary good resources), it isn't too hard. Find some better books, and don't bother criticizing Stewart around your professors. They've forgotten what is was like learning calculus; because they've mastered it, EVERY book looks good to them! And besides, being academics, they'll generally just say that it's good, not because they've thought about it, but because the department has chosen it for them, and all that talk you hear about "learning to think for yourself" isn't always widely practiced by people who say it.

Good luck, and maybe look up Silvanus Thompson, Michael Spivak, or Morris Kline. Those guys will help you out.

(And if you're a physics student being taking advanced electromagnetism or quantum mechanics, you can call it "Griffith's Rule." This theorem also dictates that, as the size and quality of the book decreases, the cost function increases exponentially, as does the number of crappy jokes.)