Cheap Calculus : One Variable (Book) (Satunino L. Salas, Einar Hille, Garret J. Etgen) Price

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Customer Reviews of Calculus : One Variable

Great Book.
I got this book (eigth edition) in 1998 and it took me several years to fully appreciate it's contents. I'm not sure what's changed in the 9th besides reordering the problems. This book is for beginners of calculus, but it assumes that a certain level of mathematical maturity has been reached. The authors assume you understand mathematics, not just manipulating equations. The proofs are not that hard to understand IF you understand the mathematical argument.

When I first started this book, it made very little sense. Persistance paid off for me and it will pay off for you. You will obtain a deeper understanding of calculus that won't go away after you complete the course. If you're having difficulty understanding the material in this book, you need to take a step back and visualize what the book is saying. As the book says in the beginning, calculus is just high school math with limits.

The solutions manual is useful if you get stumped.

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very helpful supplement
Despite the highly theoretical way of writing, this book acts as an excellent supplement either as a review, or as part of a class. The examples are concise and clear. There are many examples detailing how a certain problem should be done.

The problems at the end of each section vary between relatively easy and incredibly difficult.

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Way too theoretical
I used this book for undergraduate Calculus I and II. I had never taken calculus before and if it weren't for my wonderful professor, I would have hated and failed calculus. This book was definately not geared toward beginning calculus students-its way too theoretical. Instead of working out examples, they spend most of their time proving theorums. When you're just trying to understand the basics of calculus, how to differentiate, integrate and determine whether or not a series converges, you don't care about the proof, you really don't! I think this book would be better for an advanced calculus course where the students already understand the basics and want more theory. This book was just way to abstract for me. It didn't help to understand the material so if you don't have a good professor and you've never taken calculus, this book is not going to be your cup of tea.