St Guide T/A Vector Cal 3e: Midlife

I love this textbook and highly recommend it to any math major. The book is fairly technical, but the explanations are brilliant. And the authors really do try to give the student an intuitive understanding of what the underlying concepts mean (e.g. the explanation of the curl operator). Like any technical text, don't expect to read it like a novel. Applications are of periphery importance in the text (if it doesn't have "Applications" in the title, don't expect applications!)

This book in its fourth edition benefits from revisions to earlier editions. For a short quick reference the book by Schey is delightful. Marsden and Tromba give a more thorough and complete work. It is well laid out and has good illustrations. One could look at this book as Calc III with applications. For most people that part of the calculus sequence was far too quick and terse. This book is the antidote. It is definitely worth considering for use in the junior-senior level course on vector calculus.

I taught myself vector calculus from this book. It is clear, concise, and fabulously well written. Though it doubtlessly makes an valuable reference, you will enjoy just reading it from cover to cover. Really a treat, worth the price.

After you've learned calculus from a book like Stewart's, this is the definite next step. It includes lots of proofs for most of the theorems. I love the way the textbook is organized. And all the explanations are incredibly clear. The choice of notation makes all the formulas a lot clearer than in other books. Although I am not as big a fan of math as I am of physics, I must say that I really enjoyed reading this book a lot, and believe you will too. This book seriously makes advanced calculus incredibly fun!

The way this book explains calculus relating to multiple variables is somewhat different from old others. After reading from cover to cover, I come to settle many why and why in multiple calculus. If I have to read only two books in college, I will not hesitate to read this first.