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Title: Calculus, Early Transcendentals by James Stewart ISBN: 0-534-36298-2 Publisher: Brooks Cole Pub. Date: 04 June, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $136.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.79 (28 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: If only I can rate it lower than 1 star!
Comment: I had taught this book several times and I only get more and more frustrated with it.
This is a text book full of mistakes. I began to wonder if the author was indeed a mathematician. Some complained that this book was proof-oriented but I don't feel this way. The proofs presented are either too shallow or wrong. If I were a good student trying to figure out why a theorem might work, its explanation would only raise more questions for me. And I had yet to find another textbook which gives a wrong proof to a simple result such as lim_{x->0} sin x / x =1.
Some praised the problem sets given. I feel the opposite. The problems sets are shallow and present no challenge at all to the more advanced students. Some of them even appeared before the material was covered. The examples are either trivial or wrong. I was startled to see the author gave the wrong solution to some of the most classical problems in calculus. For example, the author could use implicit differentiation to find tangents at a self intersection!! Wow, I am lost for words. More better examples than those given are needed to help students avoid some of the common pitfalls that they often encounter.
The inverse trig functions were also defined most scandulously. Although I can guess the reason behind it, but I think the definition could present a false security to students who are not careful with composites of trig and inverse trig functions.
The materials are scattered around with no rythem at all. I often found myself working into a concept and before the climax the book suddenly digressd to something else. The most obvious example is parametrization. This was separated into several parts and could have been easily treated as a coutinuos flow.
The treatment of vector calculus part is substandtard, but I assume this is probably hard for many authors. Vectored-valued functions of several variables are hard for most students to visualize in their minds. So the 3D graphics in the textbooks come to play a very important role helping students understand this part of material. But the graphics in this book lack the clarity as those in some other books I had used before. Somehow they look less 3D to me.
I had found more than a dozen of mistakes (I am not talking about typos) during the course of my teaching and I had not read the book cover to cover. Since this is a very popular book I regret to see that no effort had been made to correct the mistakes after so many editions.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent
Comment: Very good book and it will make calculs really interesting for you.
Rating: 1
Summary: Too Much, Yet Too Little
Comment: (review of 4th ed.) I have used this gargantuan book for three semesters now. This book is proof that quality does not equal quantity (1100+ pages). The book has lots of pictures, which I suppose is why it is so big. How do color photographs of nature scenes aid one's understanding of calculus? Answer: they don't...period.
Yet for such a large book, coverage is quite sparse. The coverage starts with a slow introduction to functions, which I suppose is good for high-school students or students who lack the most basic mathematical background, but not for typical college students. Very little of the coverage has any depth, and too many proofs are 'outside the scope of this book'. By the time Stewart gets to vector calculus (covered in a single chapter), the coverage has become pure cookbook. For instance, divergence and curl are given as formulas, with no real discussion of their significance.
Also, the book is organized very strangely. For instance, parametric equations and parametric surfaces are discussed in separate chapters. Even worse, the relationships between parametric curves, scalar fields and vector fields (the three types of multivariable functions) are never discussed. Perhaps it was just hard for me to see the relationships because they were on opposite sides of an 1100-page phonebook!
Suggestion to Mr. Stewart: If you feel your book really needs to be so long winded, at least break the book into two or three volumes. Carrying my books to class shouldn't feel like boot camp!!! My friends think I'm carrying bricks in my backpack!!!
And to the students: if you have a choice in the matter, consider either Apostol's "Calculus" or Spivak's "Calculus". If you are really adventurous, try Courant or maybe even Rudin. Also, for a pretty-good intro to vector calculus, check out Schey's "Div, Grad, Curl".
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Title: Student Solutions Manual for Stewart's Single Variable Calculus: Early Transcendentals by Daniel Anderson, Jeffery A. Cole, Daniel Drucker, Stewart ISBN: 0534363016 Publisher: Brooks Cole Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Student Solutions Manual, for Stewart's Calculus: Early Transcendentals Version by James Stewart, Columba Stewart ISBN: 0534251609 Publisher: Brooks Cole Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Single Variable Calculus: Early Transcendentals by James Stewart ISBN: 0534355633 Publisher: Brooks Cole Pub. Date: 19 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $105.95 |
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Title: Multivariable Calculus: Stewart's Student Manual by Dan Clegg, Barbara Frank ISBN: 0534359574 Publisher: Brooks Cole Pub. Date: January, 2000 List Price(USD): $33.95 |
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Title: Calculus (with CD-ROM) by James Stewart ISBN: 053439339X Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Pub. Date: 20 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $135.95 |
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