A First Course in Calculus

As earlier reviewers noted, there's nothing fancy about this book, just a clear explanation of single variable calculus.

a book that focuses on the foundation without trying to do too much and it does that very well. self-contained and easy-to-follow, this book promotes understanding of the basics. very good

I had to take a refresher calculus course as a prerequisite to get into graduate school, but the assigned text (Edwards and Penney) was horrible. Like every other mass market calculus, it was filled with colorful diagrams and digressions on how to use calculators, but little in the way of explanation. Fortunately I found Lang's calculus in the university book store and it cured all of my problems. Unlike the bloated E & P, Lang's book is clear and concise. E & P covers more material to be sure, but for the essentials nothing beats Lang. After reading this book calculus became easy for me again. Which is as it should be, since calculus is a surprisingly simple subject if expalined well.

This book by the late Prof. Lang covers calculus in a clear and concise manner. I own more than a few calculus books and this book is one of my favorites. The book looks like a math book in that it is not a 1200 page glossy coloring book with multi-colored inserts on every page. I think that the style of this book is a hugh improvement over most of the books on the market. I think a student who buys this book along with a good calculus study guide would be very well set.

As a high school teacher, I used this text with great success several times for both AP Calculus BC and AP Calculus AB courses. It is my favorite calculus text to teach from, because it is very user-friendly and the material is presented in such an eloquent way. There are no gratuitous color pictures of people parachuting out of airplanes here. Opening this book is like entering a temple: all is quiet and serene. Epsilon-delta is banished to an appendix, where (in my opinion) it belongs, but all of the proofs are there, and they're presented in a simple (but not unsophisticated) way, with a minimum of unnecessary jargon or obtuse notation. He doesn't belabor the concept of "limit"; most calculus books beat this intuitively obvious concept into the ground. Even though it doesn't cover all of the topics on the AP syllabus, I would rather supplement and use this text rather than any other.