Jeff Daniels Books

This is the worst math book I have ever been forced to buy. This book does not teach you calculus, it only gives word problem after word problem that your regular calculus student will not be able to solve! Most require a knowledge of physics or economy, as well as even-- topography! I am SO FRUSTRATED with this book. If someone has any idea where I can get the complete solution's manual, (the student solutions manual only gives answers to 25% of the problems, in such a way that I can't possibly practice enough to do well on the exams or even LEARN), please email me at angelaalbert@hotmail.com THANKS, and good luck to you all that take math with this book. You will need it.

Calculus is confusing enough. You don't need a terribly written book to make it worse. The explanations are poorly written and extremely short. It takes a comprehensive understanding of calculus in order to understand anything that the author says. A well written book shouldn't have arrows pointing in random directions. Random arrows don't make a confusing concept any less difficult to comprehend. I could read my chemistry book and learn more about math than by reading this one.

Besides the picture on the front, this book is horrible! I've learned more by personal derivation and experimenting than through this book. The explanations are overly bloated, and include so many approximations and tables that the theory behind this book's ramblings is lost completely. Instead of focusing on theoretical multivariable calculus while introducing, as a short diversion an approximating method, this book builds around a foundation of approximations, which clouds the actual mathematics in the process.

In my opinion, unless theory is ingrained in students' heads from the start, they will never even attempt to understand it. After all, the book gives the theory second priority, so why should students pay any attention to it?

Moreover, in the introduction, the book promises to have problem sets that a student "cannot just look for a similar example to solve... you will have to think." However, after working with this book's homework problems, I've found them to be the exact opposite of this! There are plenty of similar examples for any given problem, and as a result the teacher's role becomes trivial, while at the same time students don't really understand anything they're doing. Not only this, but the problems are overly MUNDANE, and there is too much practice for a single concept. If a student has taken calculus, he can do derivatives, so he should not need 31 exercises to learn how to do partial derivatives.

Capping all this off, there are no truly challenging problems at all in this book. All of them focus on mechanical methods rather than clever application of known theory. The biggest challenge in this book, in fact, is keeping your hand intact as you take 50 partial derivatives, and then hit a problem that says "repeat for the second partial derivatives."

Meanwhile, your fine motor skills deteriorate quickly as you overwork them drawing or re-drawing a graph or table every other problem.

Bravo, Debbie Hughes, you can use Mathematica's graphing capabilities to their fullest. We're all proud of you. Now can you keep them out of your textbook? No one wants to see a billion tables staring them in the face, and then have to copy and change a billion more for homework. That's not a way to learn. This whole textbook is just a way to pretend you're learning.

Waiting to really learn anything from this book is like waiting for Richard Simmons to get married. Trust me, it's not gonna happen, folks.

kubkhan

"This innovative book is the product of an NSF funded calculus consortium based at Harvard University and was developed as part of the calculus reform movement" Beware of Harvard, i.e. reform Calculus. Instead of teaching people about maxima and minima, you show them how to use a calculator to guess. What a load of junk. Nobody learns what anything means, just how to apply formulas, etc. It is a shame what books and authors like these are doing to college mathematics. This book is particularly bad, a whole bunch of fluff, not a damn ounce of substance.

I have to disagree with my fellow Californians and unfortunately agree with someone from New York. This is an excellent foundation overview without the clutter of Anton's and Stewart's books. I found it to be a conveniently carried paperback and an enjoyable read.

This book carries only the answers to the odd number problems. The text itself carries answers to the odd number questions.

This book only has every other odd. And the solutions are hard to follow, just like the accompanying text book. If I wasn't taking class in a classroom environment and only had the books to rely on I'd be in bad shape.

This book was a real waste of money. Only a select number of odd problems were worked out, and it always seemed to be the easier problems. Much of the time just the answer was given, which could be found in the back of the textbook. This is the perfect accompaniment to a very confusing, poorly written textbook

This is a good companion book for the math book that follows. The answers are given in good detail and explained enough that you could follow what they are saying. The only real problem I had with the book was, it only had the odd answers. You are practically buying an extended version of the back of the book.

When doing problems for the textbook, it seemed that the solution guide did a pretty poor job in describing the correct way to do the problems. Oftentimes it did not even have a sample for each type of problem in the section review excersises. The solutions found in the back of the book were an adequate enough solution guide for at least the calculus class I had taken.

This manual has only every other odd problems solved(1,5,9...) Who is going to do others? Answers are not consistent with the book. It is very brief and not as comprehensive as calculus students may need.

This book is so pathetically minimal that I award it...1/10 of a star. (It may be useful in starting a fire in your fireplace...maybe). DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS SOLUTION MANUAL! It only includes about every other odd solution, and most of the time, it shows just the (often incorrect) answer. The worst part is, that same answer is usually in the back of the textbook! It is definitely not worth even $5.00, so save your money!

THIS BOOK IS POOP.
It's good for Triumph the insult comic dog to poop on.
Worthless.
Poop. (oh, I already said that)

I bought this Student Solutions Manual as your website suggested along with Calculus : Single Variable. The solution manual was the third edition while Calculus, Single Variable was the fourth edition. You need to correct your website because the solutions manual does not match the text book. I did return this book.

This "solutions manual" only offers answers for every fourth question. The most painful part is that the so-called solutions are merely the answers from the back of the text book put into complete sentences; there is NO additional instruction.

Unfortunately, Amazon does not offer any way to properly rate this waste of money.

This solutions manual is pretty much a waste of money (just like the textbook this is used for). For some reason, it answers every OTHER odd number. Basically answering problems 1, 5, 9, and so on. Other times, it actually skips some of those numbers!

The only reason why I gave it 2 stars is the fact that the problems the solution's manual does answer actually did help a little. Unfortunaly, it can be wrong once in a while, as my teacher can contest.

Don't waste your money on this unless you can find it for at most, a third of the price. Even then, the frustration probably still isn't worth it.

Do not purchase this solution guide! You are better off with the solutions in the back of the text. This guide does not explain anything! What a waste of money.

This book is completely worthless. Not only it doesn't work out all the problems, it doesn't even work out all the odd problems. Just a random problem here and there. In many of the problems it doesn't explain how they got the answers or where in the text you can find some help.

I needed a textbook in a hurry, so I ordered one from this company since it was a good price and in stock. Many days after I had ordered and paid for the book, they emailed me and said it was not in stock, so I had to go through the whole process again after losing almost a week of time. A refund was issued, but this was still a big problem for me.