Rating: 
Summary: Excellent introduction to calculus
Review: One of those rare math books that read like a thriller. Those who loved William Dunham's "Mathematical Universe" will surely treasure this one. Thank you Mr. Thompson.
Rating:
Summary: wonderful!
Review: I am a sophmore in high school, and taking alg.2. We have an option to take Statistics or Calculus our senior year. I want a mathematical career, so I'm going to go with Stat. However, I also want to know Calculus to try to jump the crowd. This is and excellent book just for that.
Rating:
Summary: Should be about 20 stars!
Review: This is a great book! I am on only about the 5th chapter and I am already learning a lot from it. I started reading it at work. The post where I was working (private security) when I started reading this was very cold, and definitely not very conducive to learning such things as differential/integral calculus. I still picked up the concepts he teaches very quick. Recommended reading for even Junior High readers to the doctor in math.
Rating:
Summary: Impact on high school student
Review: As a high school student, this book encouraged me to pursue further and more challenging courses, even as teachers wondered how I could understand the topics. This book does truly make sense of "hard and discrete" material, normally reserved for math team or advanced classes.
Rating:
Summary: Thompson makes Calculus as easy as a cookery recipe!
Review: This book was first published in 1919. My copy was printed in 1952. Thompson's prologue says "The fools who write the text-books of advanced mathematics seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness...."
This book is the beginners ants pants of Calculus!
Buy the book and while you are about it, buy also
P Abbott's "Teach yourself Calculus". Both books
will enrich your life, I promise!
Rating:
Summary: Thompson was a Great Teacher.
Review: I studied Calculus fifty years ago and read Dr. Thompson's book over the 1996 Christmas holiday. To my great pleasure and reeducation, I found the method and clarity of presentation to be refreshing, practical and, as the title says, easy to relearn. I would recommend this book to any high school student thinking about entering any of the scientific or engineering fields
Rating:
Summary: Simple and sweet!
Review: Though it was origionally written many years ago, this book still has the power to teach anybody simple calculus. As a
Geometry student, I studied this book on the side. It allowed
me to skip a year of Precalculus, and still pull off the A in
Calculus class. I heartily recommend this book to anybody
because of its simplicity in explanation, and clearness of
direction.
Rating:
Summary: More interesting than crosswords
Review: I withdrew from first year university calculus after the first lecture - it was some impossible situation involving rowing across a river. In a theatre with hundreds of not especially attentive students, it was just all lost on me. I took stats instead. Learning mathematics is like knitting; it all works great unless you drop any stitches. Areas you fail to understand early on, block you from all later learning based on the same idea. I enjoy reading about science, and 20 years after leaving university, it was this that sparked an interest in Calculus. Reading popular science books helped me understand that Calculus was important, useful and bloody interesting - and that it might be worthwhile actually knowing how to do it. This kind of book means that anyone who is reasonably interested can sit down and learn it for themselves - knitting brain cells at your own speed. For the last 6 months, this book and a working notebook for the problems has sat on my reading table, and a couple of times a month, it gets opened and I do more problems from it. It is astonishingly satisfying to be able to differentiate impossible looking equations that previously, I would have spluttered in disbelief at the idea that I could solve them. It has made me properly understand how to manipulate equations - something I don't think I ever really learnt properly before. Now I am confidently flipping equations around, doing things several ways to check my answers, and growing brain cells in the process. I do not move on to new problems until I have solved the previous one and have really understood it. The holes in my own math understanding have stopped progress at times. It uses but does not give the equations for things I only dimly remembered existed such as how to find the roots of quadratic equations and trigonometry equations. Those without decent high school mathematics will need other sources to help them. This is way more fun than crosswords. When I finish it (which could take some time) I will miss this book. I am going to have to get something else along the same lines. Any recommendations?
Rating:
Summary: One of the best math book
Review: This is a book I definitely would keep for a long time, even until I go to college. I'm HS junior and taking AP calculus, with only algebra 2 as preparation from last year. I found this book is very easy to understood even for a self-taught person like me. I would recommend this book for every body who is taking calculus with or w/o proper preparation.The sample question covered broad type of calculus question you might face in the exam. I actually borrowed this book from my school library,and found it's worth to have it one at home. Now I'm gonna purchase it.
Rating:
Summary: You won't really understand Calculus without this book!
Review: Most calculus courses are taught to college freshman by graduate students who really didn't understand the course when they were freshman being taught by graduate students who didn't understand it when they were taught, etc, etc. Once you realize that most college instructors aren't proficient in the course to teach it, then you start to realize that if you're ever going to truly understand calculus, then you better find an alternative source of knowledge. And this book is exactly that source.
Read this book before you enter one of those imposing lecture halls (or at least the appropriate chapter of this book). Then and only then will you begin to at least recognize what the instructor is saying. And hopefully you will recognize when they're saying something that is not quite right.
Calculus is not hard; it's just not easy. This book probably should have been titled Calculus Made Understandable, or Caculus Made Fun, but it wasn't. So read the book and do the problems. It will open up a whole world of enjoyment that will last a lifetime.
Remember this very important point. Math was never learned in a lecture hall --- it's only truly learned in a study hall or library doing problems over and over and over.
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