Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
182 of 208 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best there is - and I'm familiar with the others, May 12, 2000
I was one of the pre-publication reviewers for the second edition of this book. I have not been shy about telling a publisher that their book stinks if that's my opinion. But the Stewart book was then, and remains now, IMHO, the best introductory calculus text available. Please note that the majority of negative reviews came from people who have seen exactly one calculus book, and they clearly don't like calculus! But I have taught from three of the most popular books, and I've read most of the others. There may be other books which take a radically entertaining, non-traditional, and more superficial approach to the subject, and those books may meet with approval from people who really don't want to learn calculus. But of those (many) books which cover the traditional topics in an introductory calculus course, no other author has written a text as learnable as Stewart's. On every topic, Stewart is clearly conscious of the fact that his reader doesn't already know the subject, and he has given some thought to exactly what has to be explained in order for the student to learn successfully. Remember, most textbooks are not written for students: they are written for the professors who are going to choose the books. Professors are not generally impressed with a book which spends a half page clearly describing the meaning of a theorem which can be written with a one-line equation. But students will appreciate the effort Stewart has exerted to help them learn. Stewart does not sugar-coat or resort to gimmicks or superficiality in order to make the material learnable. All the material is there, it's just presented with an awareness that the reader is trying to learn calculus for the first time. If you are taking a calculus course with any other book, try to get a cheap used copy of the Stewart to use as a supplement. It will help!
|
|
|
57 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent but Dense: A comparative Review, January 24, 2006
I took calculus over 20 years ago using a book by Howard Anton. Wanting to brush up on my skills, I recently took a Calc II and Calc III course for review. The book I used this time around was Stewart's "Calculus", 5th edition. I thought it would be a breeze, but trust me, after 20 years, it wasn't. Thinking there might be a more helpful calculus book out there I decided to see what else might be available. In my search I came across several other excellent calculus books, but after all was said and done, I have to say that the Stewart textbook is really one of the best.
One of the of the calculus books that almost always received a lot of praise was "Calculus With Analytic Geometry", by Ron Larson. In fact it received such high praises, I found a good deal on a used copy of the seventh edition and bought it to supplement the Stewart text. And I have to admit, I found the layout in the Larson text to be much better than the Stewart text. With Stewart, I was constantly having to highlight things and draw in boxes or add notes to show where examples ended and text began, or what an example was supposed to be teaching, or what specific step in an example was key. In the Larson text, all of this is nicely laid out. Each example is labeled to indicate what it is about, and colored text, annotations, arrows, etc. are used to clearly show where the important points are. When it came to explanations though, I did not find the Larson text to give any better explanations than the Stewart text. In fact, I often felt the Stewart text provided slightly better explanations. I would read the Stewart text and then read the Larson text and think, "Gee, I'm glad Stewart pointed this or that out". Overall though, the differences were minor. In fact, sometimes it seemed that the text was almost identical, and it was only after careful reading that the differences could be noted.
In at least one case, Larson presents material I haven't seen anywhere else that really simplifies some integrals, and that is the tablature method, which is just a short hand way of doing multiple integration by parts, but it can really save you a lot of time.
As a main text for a multi-semester course in calculus, either the Stewart or the Larson text would be excellent. I found the Stewart text to be less inviting and slightly more difficult to read, but generally, (with a few exceptions), a little more thorough overall.
Another excellent book to supplement any calculus text is "The Calculus Tutoring Book" by Carol and Robert Ash. This book covers most of the material covered in a standard text like Stewart's or Larson's, but in a much friendlier style. It strips away a lot of the formalism found in a standard text so that what you are left with is a practical guide to doing calculus problems. It is not packaged with a bunch of computer generated graphs and figures. Instead everything is hand sketched. At first this may seem like a drawback, but once you get used to it, you realize how much you can do with your own pencil and paper. In my opinion, this is one of the best supplemental calculus texts you can buy. It would even serve as an excellent review book in its own right.
One other calculus text that I came across and really liked was "Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach" by Morris Kline. It does not follow along quite as nicely with a standard calculus sequence and so isn't quite as easy to use as a supplement, but when I did use this book, I found the explanations to be very clear and useful.
So there it is. Stewart's Calculus, 5th edition, is an excellent text even though it is a little difficult to read sometimes. Larson's "Calculus With Analytic Geometry", seventh edition, runs a very close second, with some advantages not found in the Stewart text. Since both of these are very formal calculus texts though, "The Calculus Tutoring Book" by Carol and Robert Ash is an excellent supplemental book to consider as it offers a friendlier, more practical perspective. And if you still haven't had enough, "Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach" by Morris Kline is well written and provides additional insight and perspective.
As a footnote, though I imagine the review about the cover of Stewart's text was meant to be tongue in cheek, I personally like the cover and find that it works well on several levels. Although the f-hole of a violin and the integration symbol of calculus have nothing to do with each other, it is a nice visual image, and if one thinks of the violin as an instrument used in performing some of the greatest works in the world of music, calculus may be thought of as an instrument used in performing some of the greatest calculations in the world of math. Finally, the image was mathematically generated, so all in all, I don't think it's a bad choice for the cover of this text.
|
|
|
44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Why Such Varied Reviews?, February 26, 2004
By A Customer
There is a reason why the reviews of Stewart's Calculus textbook vary so widely. It's because Stewart is challenging. Some instructors favor Stewart because they are steeped enough in the Math to appreciate Stewart's applications and explanations of Calculus's uses in so many fields of study. But students who struggle with Math may have a difficult time with Stewart's rigor, and his algebraic/conceptual jumps. Let's review some specific qualities of this book:o Text: The text is pretty clearly written, with no errors I know of, but makes some conceptual leaps periodically. o Layout: The layout is excellent. It makes great use of consistent color coding and typographical conventions to identify classes of concepts. (I.e., It's always easy to spot and distinguish Examples, Proofs, Rules, and New Sections.) However, there are some algebraic manipulations that are sometimes combined into one line that should probably be expanded out and explained better. Even though students are expected to understand the algebra at this point, it's often crucial to explain _why_ certain algebraic manipulations are being done. Usually there is a certain form of an expression or equation that is useful or desirable for a specific reason. Such reasons need to be explicated side-by-side with the steps to reach the desired form, instead of just skipping to the desired form (as sometimes is done). o Terminology: In some places Stewart talks about "constants" when what he really means are "scalars." There is a distinction between these two concepts that is important in other fields of math that could be confused. He also uses different letters to identify "any real number" or "a particular real number" than is standard in many other texts. This also could lead to confusion. o Graphics: The integration (pun intended :) of graphs and diagrams to supplement functions, step-by-step processes, and proof descriptions in this text is frequent, helpful, and very well done. o Exercises: The exercises for each section start off easy and in close step with the concepts and example problems that have been demonstrated in the preceding section. However, Stewart's problems ramp up in difficulty quickly. Exercises in the the middle or near the end of a set often have no direct prototypes in the preceding text for students to lean on. Some instructors might consider this an asset, but when assigned carelessly can be a frustration to students. One improvement from Fourth Edition to Fifth Edition was the "red flagging" of many exercises of especial difficulty. o Proofs: Simple theorems and rules are proved in the text as they are introduced. More complicated proofs are provided in appendices in the back. The text is pretty thorough about proofs. o Worst section: I think the hardest section for students to understand (and unfortunately one of the most important in Calculus) is the section titled "The Precise Definition of a Limit". Stewart has a habit in this section, when manipulating an absolute value of epsilon expression, to abbreviate it all on one line without explaining _why_ he is performing the operations that he is. He should expand these out to multiple algrebraic lines, possibly with some text explaining that he is trying to get the epsilon expression to match the delta expression. It is impossible to be too verbose, explicit, and careful with this section. And certainly more of each of these could be used in Stewart's rendition. Other reviewers mentioned the sections on the Chain Rule, Integration by Substitution, and Integration by Parts -- all of which could be improved. Substitution and Parts could be improved by drawing the little grids of what u and du represent (that many instructors write underneath these kind of exercises before substituting). To summarize, if you're good at math this is probably a good text for you. If you (or your students) have weaknesses, stick with something simpler -- Larson's Calculus text is excellent and good to compare against this one.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Daniel Anderson
by James Stewart
by Martin Silberberg
by David Halliday
