Quick Calculus: A Self-Teaching Guide

by Daniel Kleppner, Norman Ramsey, Peter Dourmashkin

Quick Calculus 2nd Edition A Self-Teaching Guide Calculus is essential for understanding subjects ranging from physics and chemistry to economics and ecology. Nevertheless, countless students and others who need quantitative skills limit their futures by avoiding this subject like the plague. Maybe that's why the first edition of this self-teaching guide sold over 250,000 copies. Quick Calculus, Second Edition continues to teach the elementary techniques of differential and integral calculus quickly and painlessly. Your "calculus anxiety" will rapidly disappear as you work at your own pace on a series of carefully selected work problems. Each correct answer to a work problem leads to new material, while an incorrect response is followed by additional explanations and reviews. This updated edition incorporates the use of calculators and features more applications and examples. ".makes it possible for a person to delve into the mystery of calculus without being mystified." --Physics Teacher

Genres: Mathematics, Reference, Education, Nonfiction, Calculus, Science, Textbooks

276 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1985

About the author

Daniel Kleppner was an American physicist who was the Lester Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. His areas of science included atomic, molecular, and optical physics, and his research interests included experimental atomic physics, laser spectroscopy, and high precision measurements.
Together with Robert J. Kolenkow, he authored a popular textbook An Introduction to Mechanics for advanced students.

Reviews

[Arthur Edelstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best math book I have ever used. I learned calculus from it when I was about 15. Most math textbooks are 500 pages and 15 chapters of wordy, unreadable material with annoying sidebars and 100 problems at the end of each chapter (with answers to odd problems only). They seem to be geared to making people think they are getting their money's worth, like a tasteless burrito bigger than your head.

This book is concise, with usually just a few sentences per page, and an equation and maybe a graph. Page 1, a concept is introduced. Page 2 is an example. Page 3 is an easy problem. Page 4 gives you the answer. Did you get the problem right? the book asks. If not, and you need more help understanding this concept, try the second example on Page 5 which may help. Otherwise, skip to Page 6 for the next concept. Page 20 reviews concepts 1,2,3.

Why aren't all math books like this?

[Vitor Nirschl · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 🌟

muito simpático, é uma delícia quase um livro de atividades da coquetel

[H. Seitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a math tutor for a few years and try to do a light review of calculus at least once a year. This book is easily the best I've found for that purpose. If you're rusty on the basics, the beginning will help you to identify your weaknesses. If not, you should be able to fly though this book in a few relatively painless afternoons. The author does a great job of taking you through problems step-by-step while keeping the instructions and explanations as clear and concise as possible, and if you want or need to get more involved with proofs, you have that option.

This book is available at my public library and it's probably available at yours, too. It isn't the newest, shiniest book on the block (this edition was first released in 1985), but calculus hasn't changed, and there's a reason this book has stuck around. It's superior to more recent, better known books (The ___ for Dummies series), and its relative obscurity, age, and unassuming appearance made it readily available to borrow. If you need it quickly and to renew it a few times, you shouldn't have any problems.

[Goodfella · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked the format, it makes the reader engage with the book every paragraph, it is effective because you are forced to follow every deductive step. The last section includes proofs and more advanced topics and it's a great complement.

This book is as challenging as you want it to be.

[Sergio Schiavone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book, I read the second edition years ago and now the third edition. It's a great supplement to Calculus texts like Stewart or Thomas. Both are super long and full of exercises and it's easy to get lost using them. Books like Kleppner's Quick Calculus lets you dive into the action in few pages and they give you that extra kick you need to go through the main texts with more confidence. There are topics that are touched on too briefly or not at all like trig integration. In this sense, this book can't really be treated like a main text for learning Calculus, but close enough.

My favorite part were the optimization problems using differential Calculus, were you are asked to model situations and find values of independent variables that maximize a function. The best is the exercise that uses an analogy of a lifeguard having to decide how long to run and how long to swim in order to save a person drowning (minimize the time to reach a point) and how the principle of least action minimizes the path light travels through which is explained using Snell's law (light refracts in a medium like water and it propagates at an angle and slower than in air or vacuum).

It's perfect for reviewing as well and the Appendixes have proofs for those who want to learn beyond the mechanical calculation approach.

I suggest anyone reviewing try the additional questions at the end first so you can figure out before reading what needs more work.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a pretty great introductory guide! I barely passed Calculus 1 as a college freshman and had no idea what was going on. Now I do, and I'm excited to keep learning more. The text is very kindly written and I appreciate how much the authors break everything down. I'd say it's especially handy for physics students, as the authors (physicists themselves) wrote it with preparing incoming physics students who have yet to take a calculus course in mind.

My only criticisms are that I wish they spent more time on implicit differentiation, instead of relegating it to a short appendix when it's necessary to solve a few problems in the main text, and there's also a typo in the integrals section, although I think I have the first edition, so hopefully that's been corrected in the second. One of the answers to a problem is missing a coefficient, which I found a little frustrating, as it's one of the first problems you solve for the concepts they're trying to teach!

[DrewB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent primer for the topic. At the very least orients you for the topics and concepts before a course, which this did for me very well.

[Vinod Kurup · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://www.kurup.org/blog/2003/12/11...

[Pranjal Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a very good introduction to calculus. But it contains "very simple" examples. You may want to refer some other books for variety of questions. Many useful books are mentioned in the suggestions for further reading.

[Gabby Rockhill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somehow overcomplicates calculus.