Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Advanced Calculus

Son came home one weekend and announced he was failing his college calculus course. We purchased this book for him and he is now getting A's......to be honest though.....don't know for sure if it's the book or our threaat to terminate his weekly allowance if he failed.....think it's probably both.......and son says the book has helped.

If you're trying to understand a lot of the abstracts in calculus that you might have missed in high school or are tired of college professors simply skipping past material because they assume you've already come across it even when it might not have been the case, then never fear. This book can help refresh your skills in areas that you may have forgotten or might have received little if any attention. Plus, chapter after chapter, even the most difficult concepts are made easier to understand in layman's terms. So the next time you get frustrated that not even your instructor can help, get this book, catch up, and never get left out in the cold again !

Whilst as some reviewers have pointed out, the proofs offered are not always the most fundamental and rigorous available, this aspect of the text makes it surprisingly digestible. As an example, the last chapter (on complex variables) seems almost an afterthought. However the text in combination with the solved problems will have the reader performing integration using residues etc in no time. This area of calculus has many weighty tomes devoted to it, offering full and rigorous proofs of each theorem, but to gain a similar working facility to that described above one needs to trawl through almost an entire book, a much more time-consuming exercise. The book works similarly for many other areas of calculus. This I found very rewarding, as I was able to go from clueless to reasonably proficient at problem solving in a short time, which encouraged me to keep learning. The more advanced treatments are also much easier to digest once you have some familiarity and competence in the area. The only real let-down are the typos, which seem to be more concentrated in some chapters rather than others, however they are generally easily spotted and accounted for. The book is therefore perfect for scientists and engineers, as with a minimum of fuss it teaches the reader everything they need to know to perform calculations, and makes a good introductory text for aspiring mathematicians. At this price, you'd be crazy to not have it lying around somewhere.

This book has great sentimental value for me! I love this book!!! It's got everything you need to get through multivariable calculus course and/or vector calculus & Fourier Series. It doesn't really go into any analysis stuff though; it's all concrete, so you can look at this to get the 'rough & ready' versions of theorems/proofs & then find the more rigorous & abstract versions somewhere else, or later on in your studies. It's also a good reference since it covers a lot more than what you might do in a course, & could be helpful for more than one course. It has so many solved problems & theorems that might not be done elsewhere. Get this if you're in maybe 2nd-year math & are going to carry on in math, science or engineering.

These books are a cheap suplement for courses or whatever you desire, and in general, especially the ones written by the late Murray Spiegel, are quite excellent. These books are certainly not intended for courses as they cannot go into extreme depth. However, if they are assigned, the student is assumed to have enough sense to venture elsewhere (the library maybe) and find supplemental books for learning in depth stuff. Thats all part of learning. This book (now in an updated version with some really weird title which makes it worth buying alone! ) is quite excellent. Don't go and get it expecting to learn a course from. But it is good for a) a supplement for a course. b) a supplement for another course... it has lots of solved problems which oftentimes help in other courses and c) to refresh yourself on things you may have forgotten. I'd also recommend you get Spiegel's Mathematical Handbook. It is absolutely indespensible. It is just a fantastic thing that everyone should have. When you are born, they should cut your umbilical cord and hand you a copy of Spiegel's Mathematical Handbook and you will have no problems ever in life. Get both. Get a whole lot of Schaums because they are so damn cheap and useful.