Success in your calculus course starts here! James Stewart's CALCULUS texts are world-wide best-sellers for a reason: they are clear, accurate, and filled with relevant, real-world examples. With CALCULUS, Sixth Edition, Stewart conveys not only the utility of calculus to help you develop technical competence, but also gives you an appreciation for the intrinsic beauty of the subject. His patient examples and built-in learning aids will help you build your mathematical confidence and achieve your goals in the course!
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23 of 27 found the following review helpful:
Horrible for the first-time Calculus studentApr 18, 2008
By Scott I am a college Calculus instructor, and I find this book terrible for many reasons. For students looking for a solid but much more inviting introduction to Calculus, I highly recommend Larson's book over Stewart's.
Here is a point-by-point breakdown of the faults I find in Stewart's text:
Clarity of Explanation and Content Level
Stewart's explanations are often verbose, unclear, and written at a
level too high for the average Calculus student. Several of my students
have told me reading the book only confused them and did not
clarify the concepts. An introductory text should offer simpler, clearer, and more concise explanations more appropriate to the typical Calculus student.
Presentation
In this day and age, students expect visually engaging presentations that will hold their attention. Stewart's presentations are drab and uninteresting. His book is everywhere packed with dense plain text and
formulas, giving the impression that Calculus is hard, dull, and very
complex, further intimidating students who are already scared of the
subject. Students are much more likely to carefully read a text that is
visually appealing and makes Calculus seem interesting and less
intimidating. This will also help reduce their anxiety over what many
already consider a very difficult course.
Readability
Another important aspect of presentation is layout and readability. Here
Stewart's text is again dismal: His pages are overstuffed with text and
graphics throughout the book, making it difficult to reference a
theorem, particular type of example, etc. It is hard to see where one
example or proof ends and another begins. The average student is not
going to read the entire contents of a section in full detail, but will
rather reference the topics s/he is having trouble with, in order to get
the details on a theorem or to find an example problem to help with a
homework exercise. This is very difficult to do in Stewart's text due to
the crowded and confusing layout.
Homework Exercises
Stewart's text is again particularly poor in terms of his homework sets in that he tends to offer a few low-level problems and then suddenly jump into extraordinarily difficult problems with no warning or transition. Stewart also tends to couch exceedingly difficult problems between a series of relatively straightforward ones, again without warning, which is very frustrating for students who find themselves struggling over what they think is an easy problem.
All in all, I strongly advise against this text, and would urge other Calculus instructors and mathematics departments to choose another Calculus book for their classes.
10 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Meh...Dec 21, 2007
By Me I taught Multivariable Calculus using this book as a TA. You will learn multivariable calculus, it's just as good as any other calculus text but with two major problems!
1) It does Taylor no justice! The multivariable version of the Taylor Approximation is absent. The author mentions linearizing a given function [of two variables] and thats it! C'mon! This is such an important aspect of math, physics, engineering, etc... why drop it?
2) The chapter on Gauss' Theorem, Stokes Theorem (Green's as well), and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is poor, it provides little by way of intuitively understanding these integral theorems. As an added bonus (sarcasm), students, I find, have a harder time geometrically and physically understanding what the Curl and Divergence of vector fields represent! This is most unfortunate, especially for future physicists and engineers!
There are books out there that would complement Stewart on this: "Div, Grad, Curl, And All That" by Schey is one of them; the book written by Marsden and Tromba is also a good place to go for both the integral theorems and the Taylor Polynomial.
Other than this unfortunate turn of events, Stewart IS a good book. I do recommend Thomas' Calculus instead - the problem with that (as well as with Stewart) is that the price is so high. Get an older edition, you won't be missing much, you'll only gain insight and an appreciation for calculus as an undergrad.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Calculus Studied The Right WayMar 10, 2010
By Antwoine Evans
"MindWon-der"
This book is great to teach and to learn from. This book can save you money at some schools as this edition of the book can cover Calculus I, II, and III; you could end up spending over $300 if you buy the two volume edition of the book.
This book does great job explaining most lessons and concepts. The examples are detailed and the proofs are sometimes done in two different ways that will make you more interested in the math than you probably did before.
What I also like about this book is how all the sections seems to come together and magnify. For example section 9.1 and 14.3 are both on Arc Length, but one is in two dimensions and the other is in three dimensions. The presentation of both perspectives will make you think on how to think twice on the same situation. The weirder thing about it is there are 3 more ways to get the same number! lol.
A great read and investment.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
The Whole TruthJan 28, 2010
By Z. gennaro
"learner"
How this book is rated depends on one factor: Do you want to learn calculus? If you do, then this book is excellent. Read each section twice while carefully thinking about what is going on. I will say that a small percentage of the exercises are difficult, not because the concepts are difficult, but because it can be hard to know how to set the problem up and because students forget trigonometry or algebra. Find the Instructor Solutions Manual and use these harder exercises and all the project questions to enhance your understanding of the subject, not to obsess over for hours because you can't figure it out. If you don't get a problem within a reasonable amount of time, simply look at the solution and fully understand how it was arrived at.
If you don't like math AND you don't want to learn it, this book will torture you, maybe more than other texts, at least for Calc 2 and Calc 3.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Probably the best Undergrad Calculus TextDec 05, 2009
By M. Leeper
"ML"
I had this book for Calculus I, II, and III. It does a decent job at explaining everything and there are some good exercises in the book. If you actually read through the chapters, you will find yourself picking things up easier, and there are great examples in the reading.
This is probably as good as you are going to get in a Undergraduate Calculus text. I find myself going back to it every now and again to refresh my knowledge.
based on 49 reviews
( 49 customer reviews )
