Could someone give me an opinion on Spivak’s Calculus? I picked this book for voluntary study because of the uniformly positive reviews but haven’t started plunging into it yet.
Spivak is good and well-loved and even has a sense of humor.
Note that there are two ways to learn calculus: the high-school way, without proofs (Stewart is a good example) and the college-level way, with epsilon-delta proofs (Spivak is this kind.) You should decide what fits your needs best. You don’t necessarily need to learn high-school-style calculus first—my first intro to calculus was Serge Lang’s book, which is similar to Spivak but more compressed—but if you’re just getting started computing derivatives it may help to do some physics problems to build intuition.
I think I’ll stick to Spivak, then. Technically I’ve been taught the high-school style calculus twice, once in high-school and once in college, but the former was mediocre and the latter was ridiculously abridged and compressed, and I usually employed the “study one day before exam” strategy. The high-school style calculus would be most likely adequate for me but I think I should try at least once a Rigorous Math Textbook.
Could someone give me an opinion on Spivak’s Calculus? I picked this book for voluntary study because of the uniformly positive reviews but haven’t started plunging into it yet.
Spivak is good and well-loved and even has a sense of humor.
Note that there are two ways to learn calculus: the high-school way, without proofs (Stewart is a good example) and the college-level way, with epsilon-delta proofs (Spivak is this kind.) You should decide what fits your needs best. You don’t necessarily need to learn high-school-style calculus first—my first intro to calculus was Serge Lang’s book, which is similar to Spivak but more compressed—but if you’re just getting started computing derivatives it may help to do some physics problems to build intuition.
Thank you!
I think I’ll stick to Spivak, then. Technically I’ve been taught the high-school style calculus twice, once in high-school and once in college, but the former was mediocre and the latter was ridiculously abridged and compressed, and I usually employed the “study one day before exam” strategy. The high-school style calculus would be most likely adequate for me but I think I should try at least once a Rigorous Math Textbook.