Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Introduction to Vector Calculus
Review: This book teaches the main topics in vector calculus with an emphasis on its applications to electrostatics. As its subtitle suggests, the presentation is rather informal, but I enjoy Schey's conversational style.The proofs are by no means rigorous, but the proof sketches are detailed enough to convey the main ideas. Schey takes great care to motivate the equations and to provide some geometric intuition for what they mean. To illustrate the geometric ideas, the book includes a liberal dose of excellent figures. As is true with most math books, however, you really have to do the problems to get the most out of it. Some of the problems are not only challenging, but are designed with incremental sub-parts to teach new results. The book also includes solutions for many problems. Be warned however: writing out the complete solutions to all the problems (as I have done) takes a large amount of time and fills more pages than the book itself!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book to brush up your Vector Calculus
Review: This little book is a real gem! For a long time till I read this I had been left confused and puzzled about the physical intuition behind these ubiquitous vector operations. [btw, even today I don't claim to be a god of Vector Calculus ;)] This little book is a very handy book to flip through in such a case to clear up some of the concepts you failed to grasp during your college lectures... It keeps a good balance between providing the intuition in the form of examples from Physics [Electric Field mostly], as well as pretty-rigorous math [If not 100% hard core rigorous] as well as the geometric insight that is so necesary to appreciate the usefulness of these concepts.
The fact that it is a small volume, and the light and easy going style of it's prose makes for great positives.
The problems given at the end of each chapter are also adequately challenging.
On the whole a very nice book. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book to brush up your Vector Calculus
Review: This little book is a real gem! For a long time till I read this I had been left confused and puzzled about the physical intuition behind these ubiquitous vector operations. [btw, even today I don't claim to be a god of Vector Calculus ;)] This little book is a very handy book to flip through in such a case to clear up some of the concepts you failed to grasp during your college lectures... It keeps a good balance between providing the intuition in the form of examples from Physics [Electric Field mostly], as well as pretty-rigorous math [If not 100% hard core rigorous] as well as the geometric insight that is so necesary to appreciate the usefulness of these concepts.
The fact that it is a small volume, and the light and easy going style of it's prose makes for great positives.
The problems given at the end of each chapter are also adequately challenging.
On the whole a very nice book. Highly recommended.
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