Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!
Review: Best Calculus book i have encountered yet. Really helps a student of Mathematics understand important concepts!
Rating: 
Summary: Particularly strong on applications!
Review: I have used this as a supplementary text in teaching calculus and have found it to be an excellent personal resource. The author's manner of explaining is delightfully clear. Stewart doesn't hesitate to expand his explanations, but he doesn't do it simply for effect: his words clearly help the reader to understand the concept. I particularly appreciate Stewart's use of graphics that can be understood without a great deal of technology. While this text can certainly be used in a technology-rich setting, it doesn't need either a computer lab or a graphing calculator to benefit from the explanations, the development, and the opportunities for skill-building or exploration that Stewart provides. I like it very much.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is the most intelligent math book I have ever used. Everything is clear and easy to follow.
Rating:
Summary: breaks all the barriers to understand and practice calculus
Review: A wonderful book that explains and teaches calculus in an easy manner. No myth or jargon. A reference for a lifetim
Rating: 
Summary: A highly frustrating journey through calculus
Review: The author of the book obviously has a great degree of mastery of calculus and the systematic structure of the book is well arranged and everything is thoroughly defined in mathematical terms. That's about the only thing positive however I can say about this book. I don't care how well Stewart knows Calculus and how well he shows it off, that does not equal students comprehending this subject. The biggest drawback of this book is that the author makes frequent conceptual leaps and constantly skips steps in problem solving which often make it extremely hard to figure out how the author arrived at a particular conclusion or solution. Not only that, the book is stuffed with unnecessary filler in order to increase it's size and hence make more money of it. Application to economics and natural sciences, linear approximation, graphing calculator section and etc. are of course interesting, but they are absolutely non essential to the 1st two semesters of Calculus. There is quite a bit of material to master in the subject as it is and an average class absolutely has no time to go in anything but the essential material. I'd say half of the book can be thrown away. The extra stuff might be helpful as reference but unnecessary for an average Calc class. Morever, what angered me was the clear marketing scheme for the book: this new fith addition is virtually the same as half thinner 4th addition, and features lots of non essential material...obviously to make more money without actually writing another book...by canceling the print of 4th edition and making colleges and highschool buy the new, more expensive, more useless 5th edition. This book can be very frustrating for students when the try to master calculus and will give you lots of hedache before you actually throughly understand something and without the guidance of a good professor the 5th addition is not the most helpful material. This book might stimulate your intellect if you are a math whiz, but for most, average joe people just trying to master calculus this book will cause much unpleasantness.
Rating: 
Summary: Not totally worthless, but close.
Review: This is supposed to be an introductory text, yet it assumes the reader is somewhat familar with the calculus concepts. Add that to his annoying habit of making odd algebraic leaps with no explaination and you have a bad text.
Nearly every student I know, hates these books, yet the teachers love it. That shows how poorly aimed it is. If an introductory texty is written so only a math professor can work through it, the book needs to go back to the design stage. The worst is the chapter covering the fundamental thereom of calculus. After working through every single chapter in the book, that chapter still confuses me. You would think the one chapter he would make the most clear, would be the one that the entire subject is built on.
The chapter on differential equations is so out of place and pointless. It should be removed. For some odd reason it separated the chapters on parametric equations/polar coordinates(for some reasons, they shoved conics here) and vectors, and stuck infinite series and sequences between them. What sense is that?
An intro text should cover the how, and this one does, but also the why, which is cloaks in obtuse proofs and explainations. I have had only one excepllent math text and that was written by the instructor and tailored to his class. Every other generic math text I have read has been barely adequate or worse. This is one of the worst. I think the only one I had that was worse was 'A transition to advanced mathematics'
Rating: 
Summary: Hardly a keeper
Review: Having now completed the Calculus series, I would like to say that I am not a fan of this text. It seemed less intolerable for the later chapters--vectors, multivariate calculus and vector calculus were all fairly well presented. However, the rest of the material is not. I'm something of a mathematician, as a Computer Science major, and I can honestly say that this textbook is not geared toward students to whom this material is unfamiliar and tangentially important to their studies. As opposed to Anton's text that I used in high school, which was clear and concise, this one was wordy and excessively preoccupied with proving every theorem--fine if you're a math major, but I really didn't need to know all that. I wouldn't mind so much, except this stuff came at the expense of genuine examples, which are sorely needed at this point in the ballgame. The book is supposed to cover the entire calculus series, which is another reason it is so compactified. The exercises this book prescribes are often cryptic, requiring some feat of math legerdemain to pull them off. They go from easy to really hard really quickly; a lot of them can't be solved from a beginner's frame of reference. If it's required for the class, you have no choice, but if a teacher somewhere is reading this, I recommend Anton's excellent Calculus text--this one is fine for math majors, but for science and engineering types, not to mention general ed students, this is a daunting and cryptic tome.
Rating:
Summary: Clear presentation
Review: I used this book for Calculus II, and I thought it was presented very nicely. It's easy to read and follow through the examples and then do the problems.
However, this is not the best. I believe that Finney and Thomas's ninth edition of Calculus and Analytic Geometry is the best.
Rating:
Summary: A highly frustrating journey through calculus
Review: The author of the book obviously has a great degree of mastery of calculus and the systematic structure of the book is well arranged and everything is thoroughly defined in mathematical terms. That's about the only thing positive however I can say about this book. I don't care how well Stewart knows Calculus and how well he shows it off, that does not equal students comprehending this subject. The biggest drawback of this book is that the author makes frequent conceptual leaps and constantly skips steps in problem solving which often make it extremely hard to figure out how the author arrived at a particular conclusion or solution. Not only that, the book is stuffed with unnecessary filler in order to increase it's size and hence make more money of it. Application to economics and natural sciences, linear approximation, graphing calculator section and etc. are of course interesting, but they are absolutely non essential to the 1st two semesters of Calculus. There is quite a bit of material to master in the subject as it is and an average class absolutely has no time to go in anything but the essential material. I'd say half of the book can be thrown away. The extra stuff might be helpful as reference but unnecessary for an average Calc class. Morever, what angered me was the clear marketing scheme for the book: this new fith addition is virtually the same as half thinner 4th addition, and features lots of non essential material...obviously to make more money without actually writing another book...by canceling the print of 4th edition and making colleges and highschool buy the new, more expensive, more useless 5th edition. This book can be very frustrating for students when the try to master calculus and will give you lots of hedache before you actually throughly understand something and without the guidance of a good professor the 5th addition is not the most helpful material. This book might stimulate your intellect if you are a math whiz, but for most, average joe people just trying to master calculus this book will cause much unpleasantness.
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