Customer Reviews

Thomas' Calculus, 11th Edition

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

 

 

I've used both Stewart's Calculus and Thomas'. Interestingly, Thomas has been writing calculus books for a LONG time and i've picked up several editions in the used book stores, because from the first time i bought a Thomas calc book back in Jr. High for my own self interest, i was a fan of his style.

His style is that of the old-school American text book authors who wrote in a clear, concise manner of English, using tangible and visual examples. Those old writers still thought of much of the material as novel, and were appealing to a more agrarian society of students.. especially the young and booming field of engineers. This is lacking in today's texts. The only drawback is that some old texts are much too impersonal and use the passive voice for everything, which can make them very difficult to read at times.

Thomas' recent editions (at least - i can not recall for the 60's era editions) are not only formally clear, but easy to understand and read. Here are the ways in which Thomas' book beats Stewart's book:
1) His explanations are accompanied by better graphics. Thomas uses more graphics to show each example and derivation. He uses MULTIPLE frames of graphics for one example, instead of just a single graphic. This makes following his train of thought much easier.. it's almost like watching a video.
2) His writing style is more complete. He leaves out fewer ideas than Stewart. Sometimes Stewart, like most authors, forgets to mention what exactly he is thinking and the reader is left trying to figure out his train of thought.
3) Thomas guides the reader through more (graphical) derivation of concepts. Sometimes, you will find derivations which Stewart relegates to problems for the reader (don't you hate that!?), are actually shown visually by Thomas!

Thomas' book is in fact probably the best calculus textbook around. I've looked at many many of them, and fraknly, none of them are this complete and well developed... The funny thing is, Thomas' book was one of the best decades ago. It has only gotten more exhaustive and more mature!

You should have this book in your reference library at least. You are more likely to find illustrative discussion on any particular introductory calculus subject in this book than you are in other books.

I've been rather impressed with this book. Rather than just focusing on how to go about the processes of the calculus (i.e., how to differentiate, to integrate, etc...) this book takes good time to explain why and how various things work the way they do.

Every elementary Calculus book must sweep some things under the rug; the alternative is to cover very few results and sacrifice breadth. This book strikes a good balance between breadth and depth.

In particular I found the sections on multivariate calculus illuminatory.

I took calculus back in college in the early 1970s and I was very pleased to see how much color graphics have done to make this subject understandable. I was using this book to tutor my daughter and I found it much easier than I thought it would be to teach her about the Taylor Series (for example) because of the clever use of color on the graph (showing how fit improved as more terms were added to the series). The book was very readable and seemed to be rigorous (I'm not a mathematician, but I couldn't see that anything was missing).

Be careful if you want a book on second order differential equations. There are two problems: One small problem is that this book sometimes has a chapter on second order differential equations and sometimes it doesn't. I'm not talking about two editions either...the 11th edition may or may not have that material (I think it is chapter 17). I suppose they had two printings so beware of the used copies if you want that material. Also, the table on second order differential equations has an error in it (I think it said k when it should have said ki...).

The books starts off alright, but in the second part on multivariable calculus he just starts stating things without any proof or justification and it becomes very much like plugging numbers into formulas. Not good for a maths major.

Great for students in engineering or science--but not for mathematics majors who will go on to take analysis and algebra. They deserve a treatment by Spivak or Apostol. There are some interesting problems that follow the end of each chapter. Overall, it's not that interesting, but not that bad in terms of material presentation.

I have no idea why the publishers of this book felt the need to update to the 11th edition. The organization of the topics in the 10th edition made more sense and was in line with the traditional breakdown of the three semester series of calculus classes. In particular, the section layout in the new edition may force a student who used the 10th edition in first semester calculus to repeat material if they had to switch books for second semester calculus, perhaps at the cost of other material.

I suppose publishers have to make money, and the proliferation of used books impedes them from doing that. Hence, the publishers update the text for continued remuneration, hiding under the guise of improved learning. I certainly did not find this edition to be an improvement!

Lastly, I'd like to caution the readers of this review against purchasing the "teacher's" or "instructor's" version of the 11th edition. Typically, these versions are evaluation copies that are not supposed to be resold. There may be changes to the text after the release of these versions unbeknown to the purchaser. It certainly seems like a lack of ethics for a seller to peddle these copies to the public, and it is definitely a case of buyer beware.

For someone who dosent consider math an easy subject this book could have been written better, my biggest problem with the book is that it only gives the odd solutions, i can understand if it were a junior high math book, and they were preventing kids from just copying answers down, since this is a college level class anyone who would do that probably would be failing all the tests anyway. Also step by step directions would be nice too, on many of the problems the show two or three steps in one sequence and you're partially left to figure/guess what they did and how they did it. I compare this to several chemistry biology and physics Solutions manuals that give much better detail that is more easily understandable. All that being said, it was still helpful to have, and with a little extra effort it worked out to be a good buy for the price.

We all know the answers in the back of a math textbook aren't always useful if you can't figure out how they got them. This book is the solutions manual and provides a step-by-step process of solution. Worth the money for upper level calc.

I liked how this book gave many detailed graphs to help explain the concepts. My only complaint so far is how it vaguely explained to apply the Divergence theorem and then gave a pretty ambiguous picture that was pretty worthless to understanding what exactly it applied to.

I just completed the Calc series using Thomas Calculus. In Calc I, the instructor commented that we would use this text and that it wasn't the best or the worst (a VERY safe claim to make). I would agee with that.

I found the instructional text adequate but we experienced several cases where the solution to end-of-section problems was not the technique being covered in the section.

I used the softbound vol 1 & 2. You can save some money if you are taking a semester or two of calculus, but if you intend to cover Calc III & IV, I recommend buying the hard bound.