Customer Reviews

Multivariable Calculus: Concepts and Contexts

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This textbook is the best of its kind, in my opinion. Stewart presents difficult concepts in the clearest possible way. Fully-explained examples, excellent graphics, and interesting presentations. After each section, you are left feeling that you've learned an exciting new concept. I fully enjoyed the subject. I would have given it five stars, but I did have a little difficulty with the chapter on Power Series. Other than that, I thought the book was perfect.

This really is an excellent presentation of multivarible calculus! The "but..." in the review title relates to two facts:

1. I bought the book new for $45 only a few weeks ago through Amazon and
2. The book is actually the last six chapters of Stewart's larger "Calculus : Concepts and Contexts" (2nd edition, I think - the one going for around $139). So, if you're hell-bent on buying this book at the $100 plus price, you'd be better of just getting the full version. More bang for your buck!

Anyway, I have quite a few calculus texbooks at various levels of sophistication and this one is quickly stealing my heart. I'm finding that Stewart's manner of presentation and the chosen examples, problems, solutions, and graphics, are all well designed toward the end that students actually understand the beautiful "concepts and context" that form the soul of this magnificent subject. For what it's worth, I've found it fairly easy to take this book's material and plug it into Mathematica to play and poke and mess around in order to get an even more intimate and graphical feel for it (though no Mathematica notebooks are actually provided with this textbook). A solutions manual by Don Clagg is available here at Amazon (which I haven't recieved yet) and there's also available a LabCalc series of resources for various math programs such as Mathematica and Maple that are built specifically for this textbook.

OK - have fun, but don't fork out $133 or whatever it currently costs. I think maybe someone at Amazon or the publisher screwed up with the new pricing.

This is one of the best introductory texts in multivariable calculus that I have seen in a long time. It was a required text and essentially, if you have this book, it is unnecessary to even go to class. All of the examples are clear and concise and combined with the excellent study guide, one can easily learn multivariable calculus from this book without even taking a course.

The text is written for the average student one who does not already know the subject, whose background is somewhat weak in spots, and who requires a significant motivation to study calculus.

My Harvard multivariable calculus class used this book and this book was quite helpful. It is quickly becoming a standard for non-rigorous, introductory multivariable calculus and rightly so.

I already reviewed this item. However, the book came on time, the price was on par,and it is in great shape. This seller got the job done.

I have not read through this book thoroughly, but it has been good so far. The examples are understandable and there is plenty of practice problems for nailing the major concepts.

Before reviewing i want to make 1 thing clear: THIS IS A 2 PART BOOK. They had it going for ~300 at the bookstore in my university. I found it on amazon for a much cheaper price and bought it right away. But this version was only the second part, which would be used in the 2nd semester of my math class. Of course the one in the bookstore was both parts combined. So i had to buy the Single Variable version of this as well. Pretty lame that they would split up the book like this, but maybe i just wasnt careful enough. The least they could do is make the cover picture different for each book though, not just a SV and MV difference on the top left.
Anyways, the text itself is great. There are plenty of examples that are throughly shown and explained in beginning of the chapters. I'd say i am average at best in math and i followed how they did most of them with ease. The text quality is great, clear graphics and font.
on another note, as with most textbooks, the questions are generally recycled. My friend had another version, i believe it was stewart calculus 5th edition. A good chunk of the questions were in both books, just numbered differently. So maybe you could buy a cheaper version and just compare questions with a close friend to find them in your book.

This product came to me in great shape and was recieved very quickly. It is the exact book I needed for my Calculus 3 class at over half of the price of the universities book. I recommend it to any college student looking to save some money.

James Stewart writes a great math text book. as a mathematics/physics student i highly recommend it. It provides thoughtful examples and definitions. not as theoretical as a math student may crave, though. it does not explore the uses and idea of Affine approximations, and tends to teach you how to use something only, without deriving and contributing to a students mathematical prowess. for undergrads its the best, for review its second to none. but for deeper analysis of the manipulations and nature of functions in of multivariate calculus, you may want to consider a classic like "calculus of vector functions" by richard crowell (3rd edition is the ONLY edition you should consider buying).