Quick calculus

What Hacker News says

1. galdosdiMay 2024
   I self taught myself calculus at that age (11th grade), obviously had a hard time at first, and persevered by sampling a good half dozen different books till I found one that would make things click. These are my credentials for making the following recommendation:

   Get the book Quick Calculus by Kleppner and Ramsey. Nothing else I used came close, for developing intuition about the concepts when they're fresh and new.

   Once they have mastered that, any good book will do. James Stewart's is fantastic but so big and thick you may need to use it as a resource to intelligently select appropriate readings and problems from as they go, rather than just start at page 1 and assign every problem. But the main thing is to really get the basics of what a derivative and integral and limit are from the getgo, and nothing I tried compare to Quick Calculus for that.

   Using this Julia book or some other similar book to select exercises based on your appropriate judgment from it to supplement Stewart would also be very cool if your student has an interest in programming. Let them complete then in python if they like, python should be fine. I recall implementing a numerical integrator and a symbolic differentiator in python at the same age, as a way of consolidating my knowledge of calculus, and found both to be very valuable and fun exercises. Symbolic differentiation seemed like magic especially, but it was just a matter of parsing and then continually adding rules for each rule I learned in math.

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2. aj7Jul 2021
   I’d also recommend “Quick Calculus,” by Kleppner. It has helped a lot of people. I would search for an early, used addition, as textbooks tend to get more elaborate and worse pedagogically as they are “improved.”
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3. sonimanMar 2018
   I've done this as an adult and what worked was Schaum's plus online videos. The idea that you will work through long textbooks is not realistic. Also an algebra cheat sheet esp the common algebra errors. Quick Calculus is also a good book.

   http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/cheat_table.aspx

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4. agjacobsonApr 2017
   Quick Calculus by Daniel Kleppner

   Also, if you can find an ancient copy of Thomas Calculus when it was two volumes. Buy the first volume. Solve all the odd problems, the solutions are in the back. That's how I learned!

   A later edition of Thomas was a single volume big thick yellowish book. It was very good. We used it as freshmen at MIT. You could learn from it. I don't remember if that version had answers in it. But solving problems and having answers to check against is key.

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5. bikenagaApr 2024
   I got "Calculus Made Easy" back in high school, and it helped when I first took calc in 10th grade, and then BC Calc in 12th grade. It gave me some confidence to have seen the basic ideas presented in a gentle way. Actually, once you get past the old-fashioned language and layout many math books from the early 1900's are pretty good. They don't have a lot of the abstraction that came later, some of which makes you feel like you're trying to do surgery while wearing boxing gloves. Anyway, there are other calc books which have similar intents, though different styles. Here are two:

   Daniel Kleppner and Norman Ramsey, "Quick Calculus" - We used this for math background when I was taking AP Physics in high school. The physics textbook was Resnick and Halliday, which uses calc throughout. It is not particularly intuitive, but the "programmed learning" approach makes it very easy to pick up enough basic computational ability to do applications. (The phrase "programmed learning" is so old that maybe I should clarify that it has nothing to do with computers.)

   H. M. Schey, "Div, Grad, Curl, and All That" - This might be helpful for people taking vector calculus, or using it in an electromagnetism course in physics. In fact, a lot of his examples are from E-M. Very good at providing intuition without too many technicalities.

   I think the best uses for books like these are: (a) You want to get the "big ideas" without worrying too much about technical facility (maybe because you won't ever need it - e.g. you're just learning for your own interest); (b) To provide a fair amount of the math you'll need in (say) a physics course; (c) As prep before taking a standard calc course, or maybe as a refresher. Books like Thompson, Kleppner and Ramsey, or Schey will help with the big picture and to boost confidence but it's best to read them before taking the "real" calc course - since once the "real" course is running you'll be too busy with the work in the course to read something else on the side. But do whatever works for you. Calculus really is wonderful - have fun!

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6. rmlMay 2008
   Was anyone else slightly perturbed by this article? The existence of well-funded and -connected companies like Intellectual Ventures, and their obvious influence over the authors such as Mr. Gladwell that serve to glorify them to the reading public, is rather frightening to me. As far as I can tell, they do not make a single product, nor do they provide a single service. Instead, they charge others for the right to use "their" ideas.

   It sends a bit of a chill down my spine -- I'm trying to imagine what my copy of Kleppner & Ramsey's 'Quick Calculus' (about a $20 book) would have cost if Newton had 'patented' Calculus, and if his (hypothetical, avaricious) descendants and their attorneys had insisted on their 'right' to a cut of the profits.

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