Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach (Second Edition) (Dover Books on Mathematics)

I am currently working through this book. Other reviewers have mentioned all the good points and features of this text. However, given the text is 920 pages long, the reader would normally be required to invest a lot of time working with it. With that in mind, it is natural to ask the all important question: whether this book is really for you? My answer is that it depends on your mathematical backgrounds.As we know, Kline's approach to this book is intuitive. Kline argued that "intuition" is the way human's mind learns things; and he is right on. Especially with calculus whose essence being a

As a seventeen-year-old sitting in physics class, I remember staring at a board full of kinematic equations. The goal was to memorize the formulas and learn how to apply them. But when test day came around, I had forgotten all of them. Memorization has never worked well for me.What stuck with me wasn’t the formulas, but the moments when I actually understood why things worked. That’s why I really appreciated how this book handled similar topics. Unlike my high school physics class, Kline doesn't just present formulas—he builds them from first principles, showing you how they come to be. It’s n

The book truly does make concepts highly intuitive: Parallel to the development of the "how-to" of the mathematical tools, you are immediately shown the "why" as well. I have owned this book for a while but purchased the Kindle version so I could annotate on my iPad. I compared the material from this book to various syllabi and lectures of other Calculus courses and I recognized the concepts from this book in those courses... However, the courses failed to explain the "why" behind the concepts. Learning from a typical Calculus course, you would be forced to memorize calculus principles in a ro

***On the BookI already have taken basic calculus courses not that long ago, so I used this book more for reviewing and "honing" purposes, and I couldn't be more pleased with it. The author details many derivations that were skipped in my calculus courses, for example the derivatives and integrals of inverse trig functions, the formulas of which us clueless students were forced to memorize. After reading this book, never again would I have to futilely batter my brain cells in the frantic search for a formula I was not able to retain - this is the best quality about the book. Ordinarily, studen

I first took calculus over 20 years ago and always did well in math, so I wanted a text that I could keep as a refresher (for studying more advanced statistics) and reference for things I may have forgotten. So my experience with the book may differ from someone who has never been exposed to calculus before. In my opinion, this book is an excellent introductory text for single variable calculus. While it is a bit dated (it's a reprint from 1977), given its low cost, compactness, and how comprehensive it is, I think its value is unbeatable (especially compared to current university calculus tex

I started reading this book around February and I was done by the middle of July.It certainly got me engaged in the subject to a point that, the highlight of my week was doing CalculusI began with doing some sparse notes on the first chapters and progressively I improved and structuredmy notes to even doing the graphs and summarizing the concepts on my on words with a full sequenceof the derivations and equations to solve the exercisesI did it as a way to explain to my self the concepts the author was sharing since I am doing it on my own.and on my own pace, with no regard or consideration abo

Best book on beginning calculus... learn the concepts, not memorizing formulas alone.

I'm sad to say I didn't enjoy this book much. Before critiquing; I have plenty of experience with calculus before (~10yrs ago tho) when I went to college so if you're a person that wants to know about calculus for the first time through this book, my review won't help you.That aside; I'll mention the pros first:a) The content is _very_ easy to read. To give you an idea how easy it is; I was able to blaze through > 100 pages in a day and I solved multiple exercises throughout (again, remember, I wasn't a noob in calculus so I'm technically cheating). I'm impressed how easily the author can conv