ISBN9780534393397

I've had to use this book in a Calculus for Engineers course, and it is very difficult to learn from for someone who has no prior knowledge of Calculus.

The examples in the book barely prepare a person at all for the accompanying practice problems. Around 2/3rds of the problems require applications that were not addressed at all in the examples. In addition, the answers to the odd problems in the back of the book are of no help in understanding how an answer was arrived at. Because of this, it is not uncommon to have to spend 2-3 hours trying to understand how to do the practice problems that accompany a 3-4 page section of the book, simply because the book suffers from poor presentation and design.

This is a good book in general for integration and differentiation basics and vector calculus, but some of the more complicated ideas such as Taylor series and sequences and series could be explained better. In general James Stewart does a great job making Calculus a very approachable subject. I recommend this book.

I wish I could write my own book on calc at this moment while I'm learning it, so that I know which topics I must explain with great care, not to confuse students. This book took more pages on exercises that it did for explaining the subject. Sections are short, sometimes very short, but exercises--sometimes you'll count them up to 100(!) for just one short section! Man, what kind of reasoning is it? Everyone in the world knows that calc isn't an easy subject to learn, and yet authors do not take their time to explain topics with care.Proofs are so technical, seems like it was written by a computer, not by a human being. Authors like Stewart simply forget that not everybody understands calc the way they do, and that some students, if not all, need extra examples and explanations before they can do a bunch of exercises.

I've used this book for my multivariable calculus class and did not have a very good experience with it. I don't understand why this required text is so popular, but I think it deserves 3 stars since it does it job (although far from flawless) of teaching calculus. Before I criticize it, I will begin with the positives:

Pros:

-The concepts are clearly explained. There are examples (though, in my opinion, insufficient) that teaches the main concepts clearly.

-It has an appendix that contains proofs of certain theorems and review of the math.

-It has a list of formulas on the back of the book.

-It is hardcover and the pages are durable.

Cons:

-The book is heavy - it includes both single variable calculus and multivariable calculus. It's best if it's split into two.

-Not enough examples. Some of the exercises from the book, although quite good, seem to have nothing to do with the examples. If your professor tends to be one who only goes over examples from the book and derives equations, unless you are great at math, you will have some trouble with some of the exercises.

-Unlike some other calculus texts, the words (not the numbers) are very dry and purely educational. There are no interesting notes on the sides or on the ends of each sections making the math seem more interesting.

This is not a very good Calculus book. I used Larson's book for single variable Calculus and it is much better. Since I transferred schools I was stuck with this book for multivariable Calculus and it sucks.