Customer Reviews

Essential Calculus: Early Transcendentals (Stewart's Calculus Series)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you'll notice above, the description states it is a book meant to be as concise as possible, which I believe the author definitely achieved. However, this drive to be as small as possible without lacking 'essential' topics is cheating to the beginning calculus student. Concepts should be thoroughly explained and end of chapter questions should match or slightly exceed the level of difficulty of the explained concepts in the chapter - not heavily exceed it, this is where I took off a star. I understand that the goal of end of chapter questions is to challenge the student, but the lack of thorough explanations in an effort to be as concise as possible does not prepare the student for these questions, in my opinion. Therefore, I had to seek out other materials.

In the end, I found this book to laid out very well and amazingly, for a math book, somewhat easy to read. I supplemented this book with the Idiots Guide to Calculus, which was a life saver on certain topics and went even further with Stewart's Solution Manual for this book. The purchasing of these two additional books, I hope, may be an indicator of the lack of thoroughness for achieving as small a book as possible.

I debated for quite a while about whether this was a 4 or 5 star book, in reality it's probably about 4.5

I used this book for Calculus 1, 2, and 3.

THE GOOD:
Almost no errata -- This book was amazingly consistent, very high quality here, almost no errors in it.

Comprehensive -- This book did a very good job of being thorough about the topics it covered.

Concise -- Even though it was thorough, it wasn't extremely long, the sections were split small enough that it was fairly easy to get through.

No faith required -- Lots of proofs, which is what I need, I'm a skeptic. I thought the proofs really added to the book, whenever they would say something I was skeptical about, I walk through their proofs to see that it was valid. These proofs were very helpful IMO.

Questions reflect material -- The questions that were asked were almost always directly related or relevant to the material, it wasn't very often I got to the questions and felt overwhelmed.


THE BAD:
Layout -- Minimal use of colours and whitespace, every page looked the same as every other page, which made parsing the material a little bit taxing.

Not good for reference -- This book is great for learning, but I had a very hard time going back later to locate tidbits of relevant information. (The appendixes were very good in this regard, though)


OVERALL:
In Calculus 1, I didn't use this book correctly, and really struggled. I had gotten in the habit during pre-calculus of just jumping right into the questions, and whenever I got stuck, looking back at the examples. That does not work with this book, you will be lost and overwhelmed, and spend more time in the end.

Instead, read through the whole section, when you come to the proofs, see what they are trying to prove, sit down yourself and try to prove it, and whenever you get stuck, look at the proofs they have done for you. Whenever you come to any of the example questions in the book, do the same thing, try to solve on your own, then look back at what they did. This is what I did in Calc 2 and Calc 3, and I found that it worked immensely better. I spent less time, put less effort in, and learned the material better. When I got to Calc 3, I got through the entire course this way, I didn't listen in class (instead, I studied for my English course, which was right after Calc), and every night I just went home and read the section we were covering the next day. I was doing this every day (summer course), and it seemed to take me about 2 to 4 hours to go through the section and do the homework, so expect to spend some time on it. But the point here is that the book was good enough, itself, that I was able to learn from the book without the aid of the classroom. If you can tune your instructor out well enough, it might even be beneficial to just study the book in class, you'll probably have to do it anyway, and it will probably be more productive.

You will still be stumped by some problems at times, so it is necessary to have a support network. You'll probably still need to go see your instructor on occasion, maybe find a good forum like [...], etc. It might also be helpful to buy the study guide, I didn't, because I am stubborn, but it could have been a really useful tool, I think.

Anyway, I do endorse this book, I was very pleased with it, this book along with a [...]calculator, and my obsessive learning style got me A's in all three calc courses. (Though I will admit I got to the point of not caring at the end, because it was all about vectors, which were relevant to the engineering students, and I'm a CS student).

This book was required for my Calculus II course, and would also be used for Calc I (if I had taken it), as well as Calc III.

So far, around 1/3 of the way through the semester, I have found the book to be very helpful. Whenever I had questions about some of the material, I found it was more useful to refer to the book, than my notes. There are 5 tear out reference sheets found in the front/back, which are great for referring back to. Unfortunately, since they are tear-out, this means that if you want them you'll have to buy the book new. It was worth it to me since there were also three classes that would use it.

The formatting of the book is excellent, making it easy to see which points are key, and find formula's when you're simply skimming. I highly recommend this book. It loses the 1 star because the reference sheets are tear-out.

I used Stewart's "Essential Calculus" as a text for Calculus 1,2 and 3 courses which I taught. I think this is the best text that I have used so far, comparing it to other Stewart texts, as well Anton's (Calculus Early Transcendentals Single Variable) and Larson's (Calculus: Early Transcendental Functions), which I have also used.

One reviewer gave a negative comment that the book has minimal color. i think it is excellent that it has only black and blue ink. I am sick of teaching using textbooks with color photos of junk that has nothing to do with the material being taught, and serves nothing other than a distraction. I'm glad none of that junk is in this text.

This text is fairly well organized, and there are only a few things I would change. Namely, I would change the way the chain rule for partial derivatives is constructed. I would also rearrange a few things in the introductory chapter on integration. Further, there is a small deficiency that this text has, which is shared by all calculus texts (as far as I know), and that has to do with L'Hopital's rule. In the infinity - infinity indefinite form case, you have to rearrange so that the limit has the form +/- infinity/infinity or 0/0. The trouble is, there are some examples where if you do that, the indefinite form ceases to remain an indefinite form. So the texts should remind you to check! If you write me, I can give you a simple example.

This text has 13 chapters. You can cover the first 5 in Calc 1, 6 thru 9 in Calc 2, and the remaining chapters in Calc 3. As I wrote before, it is well-organized, and concise. So there are no pitfalls to avoid, which might slow you down. The last chapter covers Green's, Stoke's and the Divergence theorems. With this text, you can easily cover all those topics, something which is not always done in Calculus 3.

Another plus is the fact that it appears that this 2007 edition is still current. I am sick of textbook companies changing the edition every three years. All that they do is rearrange the exercises and keep piling on more clutter. This is simply to keep the price artificially high. Kudos that this 4-year old edition still current.

A highly recommended text, which I would use now if I had the choice. In fact, if I had the choice, all my textbooks would be with only monotone or two-tone illustrations.

Yes, this is as it says, a more compact version of lengthier calculus books. But, because of the shorter length, which gives it the appearance of a basic normal (of a single variable) calculus book, it is more intense. This book is not for the meek, this book requires one to have an intrepid and dauntless mind as you pour your heart and soul into solving every ominous problem. But overall, well written and well designed. Cheers Stuart, cheers!

my first calc book was the Ron Larson book (ca 1999), and it's a bit more descriptive in examples here and there, but otherwise there's little difference in the approaches to teaching the material. some of the sections do choose terribly simple examples, but this is basically a condensed text. i got a lot of good knowledge from this book and now that i think about it, i'd rather use this one. hey, at least it's less weight to carry around (paperback intl edition ftw)

if you'd asked me in the middle of chapter 13, i might have had a different opinion. my advice is this: if you need this book for a class and you want some help, get the student solutions manual. this makes up for anything this text lacks... and you can leave it behind when you don't need it!

This is a great textbook. The examples are nice and the information provided is salient and succinct. This seems to be a very popular text for single and multivariate calculus, and for good reason.

I am about halfway into my university's Calculus I class, and I have to say that this book helps me out very much. My prof has a heavy (russian?) accent and this book is a good supplement to his lecture. The author is almost slightly humorous with how he tries to relate Calculus to real-world applications. I know there are few applications, but this book still helps me to understand the subject in a way i honestly thought i never would

I'm a major of mathematics currently studying as an undergraduate at university. During my high school days, I won several different awards at the math team state competition, and I have read through several books on Calculus so I know a little bit about this subject. This book does a great job a presenting the material concisely, but it has some end of chapter problems that will probably be too hard for some of you to figure out on your own. They are meant to challenge you, but the book fits so much information in such a little space that it cannot explain certain concepts enough to properly prepare you for some of the problems.

This book also suffers from the same problem that most math books suffer from in that you do one section then move on completely ignoring what you learned in the previous section or at the very least concepts presented in that chapter. This can create problems on tests and big problems on finals so it is a good idea to go back and do a few problems from previous chapters every week just to keep your practice up. Picking up a solutions manual for this book and some additional supplement books may not be such a bad idea either. If you are looking for some practice of varied nature the Saxon Calculus textbook has a structure set up that is great for practicing several different concepts instead of ignoring them after a few sections. The Saxon book is rather fast paced though and hard for people who need to do lots of examples of new material in order to grasp the concepts. It also doesn't cover nearly as much material as this book does. As a supplement, it could be very useful for your basic Calculus 1 and 2 courses in college though.

Books and supplements aren't going to be enough for you to truly understand Calculus. If you truly want to learn this you are going to have to pay attention in class, do more than the assigned homework, and probably get a tutor if you are really serious about this. Not all of you will have this problem, but I'm not going to sit here and assume that everyone can chill in the back of the class room and learn this material without practicing it just because that is my approach to math doesn't mean everyone is going to have the natural ability to do that in fact 99% of you would fail by using this tactic. You need practice, and if you have problems understanding concepts then you need to seek help from your teacher, classmates, and tutors. Good luck.

Sent very quick! Five stars! you rock! The book is in good condiction. But the fact that it got here so quick is awesome