Thursday, November 1, 2007

Essential Calculus Environment

To all interested: We changed our textbook for our Calculus Series for Physical Scientists and Engineers. The new text is called Single Variable Essential Calculus by James Stewart.


It is a boiled down version of the standard Stewart Calculus text and also published by Thomson Brooks/Cole. It is smaller, lighter, cheaper and not so filled with the extraneous information that fills most every text on the subject these days. I am doing Calculus II at the moment, and I find it quite concise and well developed. Any embellishments that I would like to see, I am happy to do on my own in lecture.

In fact, most of the stuff excised from the regular version of Stewart Calculus has been offloaded to the author's website http://www.stewartcalculus.com/.

I am interested in the student's reactions to the book. Please comment below on your reaction to the text. The more detail you can give, the better. If in the eyes of the students, it is a terrible book, we need to know that.

Thanx....

7 comments:

Weichung Shaw said...
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Murat said...
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Murat said...

I've taken Calculus 2, and I think this book is great. It is concise and clear, and these features make studying a lot easier. I especially enjoyed the questions towards the end of each set of end-of-chapter exercises - they are interesting and thought-stimulating (like the grass-eating cow problem :).

Anonymous said...

i took calc II this semester and the textbook was great. my high school textbook was about ten times the size of this one and i only looked at it for practice problems, but with this textbook i find myself reading the sections and looking at the examples. my vote is to keep this calc book for future students, and to encourage the use of shorter, more concise textbooks in every class!

Anonymous said...

I took calc II this semester too and thought the book was pretty good. Usually more example problems are unnecessary, but I just looked to the solutions manual for techniques in solving certain problems whenever there was a concept I didn't quite get.

However, it would be nice to have a book or solutions manual that had the answers for even numbered problems too... even if they weren't full solutions, this would really help when doing practice problems on your own.

Unknown said...

Having used this book for the Fall 2007 semester, I think that it is very well written and compiled. Not only did it truly teach the "essentials" of Calculus II, it also gave me a profound understanding of the material so that I was able to apply it to complex and not-as-essential problems.

I would DEFINITELY recommend this book and would call it the most useful Calculus text I have used.

Anonymous said...

What they use for Calculus III today is a terrible book! (Vector Calculus by Marsden)