Customer Reviews

Student Solutions Manual for Stewart's Single Variable Calculus: Early Transcendentals

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This solutions manual has one redeeming factor - for the most part, the solutions are accurate.

However, this is where the benefit ends. The methods for solving the problems are severely abbreviated. Problems that may take 8-10 steps to solve are presented in 3-4 steps, with little reason presented. Often, the answers to the odd exercises in the textbook provide equal guidance. Save your money and get another reference (and a different textbook, if at all possible).

Professors and others who have already studied calculus may find the solutions manual to be adequate - of course, they have already been exposed to the material. So a subset of these folks may say such things as "if you cannot understand this, you are too dumb to do calculus". Thus, though they may be able to solve a calculus exercise, these arrogant ignoramuses are blind with respect to the beginning students needs, so their opinions are irrelevant to the situation. If one is trying to learn calculus, the last thing one requires is the triviality of arrogance. Since introductory textbooks and their associated solutions manuals should suit the ultimate purpose of promoting understanding, this manual fails.

The solutions manual, much like the inferior Stewart textbook (see my review of the text), often reads like a professor's "notes to myself" manual. Some "solutions" read thusly: 1. Restatement of problem 2. Statement of one or two intermediate steps 3. Solution. This book contains many such solutions, thereby providing breadth at the expense of depth.

Though it can be done, a beginning calculus student should not spend much time trying to fill in the blanks in the author's reasoning - he or she should be learning the subject of calculus. I recommend the George F. Simmons Calculus and Analytic Geometry text, or the Anton Calculus: A New Horizon text and its associated solutions manual. ...

I don't know why they are constantly promoting this pathetic and low-quality calculus textbook from James Stewart and its accopanying solutions manual.

First of all this stupid manual from one of James Stewart's cronies does not have solutions to all the problems. At least they can have COMPLETE solutions to all the odd numbered problems but no, they want to rip the student off by giving them this pathetic student solutions manual. You get solutions that are totally incomplete therefore when you want to look up a problem is has steps and as a student you can't comprehend how they reached that step. I guess the author, Anderson was too stinking lazy to write out complete solutions to help the hard working student.

First of all the entire set being the textbook and solutions manual should be burned and never used again. Second, I think with the wealth of other great calculus textbooks such as the ones written by Larsen and Hostetler ARE WAY BETTER AND USER FRIENDLY THAN THAT GARBAGE THAT STEWART AND HIS STUPID PAL ANDERSON WRITES. Third, with the other calculus textbooks and accopanying solutions manuals out there being so much better, I think it is time to let James Stewart and his other stupid cronies know that they need to retire from writing calculus textbooks and accopanying solutions manuals.

If James Stewart and his colegue can't sit down and write a user friendly, explicit and concise calculus textbook and accompanying solutions manuals then they should get out of the math textbook and solutions manual writing business.

This manual gives the solutions, with work, to the odd-numbered exercises in the first eleven chapters of James Stewart's Calculus: Early Transcendentals. It is both concise and sufficient, and can be a very useful tool for understanding the concepts taught by the exercises in each section. It is equally useful for helping you out on a problem when you get stuck. (Of course, these benefits will be curtailed if you have a teacher who compulsively assigns even-numbered exercises simply to annoy the students.) Also keep in mind that the manual covers only the first eleven chapters of Early Transcendentals, typically covered during the first two semesters of college calculus or a full year of AP Calculus BC at the high school level. With these caveats in mind, I consider this manual to be a valuable tool for any calculus student using Stewart's textbook.

I have noticed that most people are NOT happy with the solutions presented in this manual, I agree that some of the solutions may be rather short, but it is 10 times better than being left to the solutions in the back of the text. Bottom Line = It's better than nothing.