I trust that the fact that every other reviewer gave this book extremely high praise will give students the confidence to read and use this text to learn Calculus in an ideal way. A temperature of 0 C corresponds to 32 F, and a temperature of 100 C corresponds to 212 F. Having a correct and intuitive understanding with a minimum of prerequisites is helpful and an admirable pedagogical goal. There's absolutely nothing wrong with providing students with this kind of motivation, and you really don't need a formal definition of a limit to understand the concept. Furthermore, claiming that it's "confusing" to even introduce the idea of the derivative before a formal definition of a limit is given is also unfair. While it is true that Simmons advocates leaving off the absolute value sign when integrating 1/x dx, and even assuming he got one problem wrong involving this, to dismiss the entire book as "rubbish" and to recommend "avoiding like the plague" is completely unfair and totally out of proportion. Simply one of my 3 favorite technical/ science books ever. That comment for a Math book is such a evolution.Apart from the Math issues, the author has a deep knowledgeof Phylosophy of Science and its story. It covers the genesis of calculus, the very basics of limits and function, introduces differential equations, it is very precise on describing differential and integral calculus, it gives you a solid knowledge of Analic Geometry, it is a very good guide to series and my favorite area is more than 1 dimension functions.Its exercises vary from those which teach you the way of thinking through those very hard ones that simply grant that you got it all.One of the best comments I ever read in a book for Enginneers was one that the author made about solving non linear equations.I can't remember literally but it was something like "you should try to solve this non-linear equation using your intelligence, yet sometimes you won't really find a solution". I bought it and this book helped me very much. I was surprised because the explanation wasso clear and the text was so well written and in many ways very artistic. As I was taking Calculus I simply took it at hand and started to read it. When I was a freshman in College, a friend of mine showed a book. I might have a different perspective, though George Simmons was my Calc 2 prof :-) As I moved into computer science, this provided valuable background to some of the iterative methods of calculation I was exposed to. This topic unfolded like a flower during its presentation. And why not? The great mathematicians that built the rigorous foundations beneath the calculus all knew where they had to end up. I found it enormously helpful to know where I was going before I started. While today we define the derivative in terms of the limit, this definition (and the delta-epsilon proof machinery beneath the limit concept) came after the geometric notion of the tangent of a curve. Simmons takes a historical approach to the material, following discovery after discovery. The third of these was Simmons' first edition of the current volume. Needless to say, I went through (or at least started) three calculus books. I have a big, dirty secret: I needed three tries to get through calculus.
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