Calculus, Sixth Edition

Rating:
Summary: Made Mechanical Engineering Undergrad Program enjoyable
Review: From 1987-1993 this book was the Calculus I,II & III textbook at Washington State University (WSU-Go Cougs). If I was able to solve every problem in the book and tutor others in Multivariable Calculus than I'm sure it was more my being well taught and less my skill in Mathematics. Yes Math was and still is one of my strongest subjects but having the Thomas Finney Calculus Edition 7 book alongside this textbook I will not hesitate to choose Robert Ellis & Denny Gulick for a much more thorough explaination of Theory with a broad variety of application that reinforce the theorems until one can do this stuff so well one can see the answer nearly as quick as one can simplify it down to its final result.

Thomas/Finney is an excellent addition and combined one should never be concerned with Differential Equations and Vector Analysis.

Its been 10 years and having switched to Computer Science I am now just getting back to applying Mechanical Engineering with CS and I can say I'm glad I had this background.

I didn't give the book 5 stars because no book on Mathematical Theory is Flawless.

Rating:
Summary: Fair, many errors in the solution manual
Review: In the main text book it states that the problems were checked, yet this solution manual has so many errors I have to wonder what grade the reviewer received in his calculus class. Some answers are wrong, and some completely misinterpret the entire problem.

Rating:
Summary: A good book under the correct conditions.
Review: This is intended largely as a response to the review by mjgrey, above.

Having had the fortune to take the class for which this text was intended with one of the authors, I can say that the order in which material is presented makes a lot of sense - for the way the author chooses to take the class. Some faculty, especially new faculty, may have some difficulty scheduling their classes around its ordering scheme, and those attempting to use the book to teach themselves the material would probably be quickly lost.

However, it should be noted that the author says as much in his introduction, and suggests skipping around as necessary to fit the topics as they are being introduced in the class syllabus. If the book is used as it is intended, and the instructor takes a reasonable amount of care, the ordering of topics becomes a much less critical issue.

I have found this to be an excellent volume to turn back to when basic concepts of calculus are called up (as they are time and again in statistical analysis).