I am going to look into this Spivak character as well as that Budin fellow.

A couple people mentioned the book “Calculus Made Easy”. I personally think that book is hogwash. I had picked it up at the library so that I could delve back into Calculus and see where I had went wrong. Unfortunately, though, the pages were filled with dialog about princes & queens which was a major turn-off. I read pieces of 3 pages and just decided to return it to the library the next day. So, the moral of the story: If you like learning Math by applying the concepts & operations repetitively until it’s second nature then find a different book than “calculus made easy”.

What this brings me to is…who can tell me a great calculus book that gets into the nuts & bolts, which also provides vast opportunities for practice?

Thanks, I am going to be the king of Calculus; I need your help, though.

I’m looking for something to refresh my abilities, and to inspire my two daughters with. (“Once you mastered what you are learning right now, you’ll be able to use it to…”) The older one is just starting to deal with algebra, but will be dealing with this soon enough.

That said, I saw Gilbert Strang’s text available on MITs OpenCourseware site (http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/resources/Strang/strangtext.htm), or available in paper form from places like Amazon.com and others. Does anyone have any strong opinions about it?

Gordy McGranite Grapples with Gradients

http://jldunbar.com/JLDunbar.com/Gordy_McGranite_1.html

Having said that, we have to also realize that education system is devised to cater to the needs of populace that stands in the middle of Gaussian curve of IQ. This system makes sense too; this is how you serve best the maximum part of the population, truly democratic and impartial. Unfortunately, distribution of intelligence is not really impartial. So a good society can never have its core of education system that will be aligned to the needs of the persons that are on the tail of the Gaussian curve of IQ. Hence, if a society can give liberty and space for growth of individuals with special ability, empathize with their special needs and does not thrust upon them the pedagogy and education material made to serve middle of the curve best, that society will never cease to evolve. When I talk about tail of curve of IQ distribution, I talk for both sides; and word ‘IQ’ is just to convey intent, not to be taken literally.

So I find this discussion really amusing when people say that books with more purist sort of approach are better or books with more simplification are better. We must appreciate that all books on same subject don’t have same target audience so no good book (I am not talking about half baked bad books where authors are more desperate to get published than to really share understanding)is better than other.

Now something very personal; I hated throughout my academic career reading school published/ Government published books…I hated being forced by so called education system to attend classes and limit my studies to pre-defined courses where I was forced to study many things that I was not interested to study….Coming from this background, when I got for the first time a second hand thirty year old edition of first part of Apostle’s Calculus, I found it very inspiration. That book changed the way I used to understand and perceive not only calculus but whole mathematics in general. So when people say Apostle’s book is really good but ‘dry’, I have no idea what kind of dryness you talk about. Again, even dryness is relative, if you come from a desert, even a dew drop is a hope of ocean. 

Thanks for giving me link of Hardy’s book.