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If you want to improve your understanding of calculus, then this book is for you. It can supplement standard texts at the high-school senior, trade-school, and college undergraduate levels. It can also serve as a self-teaching or home-schooling supplement. Prerequisites include intermediate algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. It will help if you’ve had some pre-calculus (sometimes called “analysis”) as well.
This book contains three major sections. Part 1 involves differentiation in one variable. Part 2 is devoted to integration in one variable. Part 3 deals with partial differentiation and multiple integration. You’ll also get a taste of elementary differential equations. Chapters 1 through 9, 11 through 19, and 21 through 29 end with practice exercises. You may (and should) refer to the text as you solve these problems. Worked-out solutions appear in Apps. A, B, and C. Often, these solutions do not represent the only way a problem can be figured out. Feel free to try alternatives!
Chapters 10, 20, and 30 contain question-and-answer sets that finish up Parts 1, 2, and 3, respectively. These chapters will help you review the material. A multiple-choice final exam concludes the course. Don’t refer to the text while taking the exam. The questions in the exam are more general (and easier) than the practice exercises at the ends of the chapters. The exam is designed to test your grasp of the concepts, not to see how well you can execute calculations. The correct answers are listed in App. D. In my opinion, most textbooks place too much importance on “churning out answers,” and often fail to explain how and why you get those answers. I wrote this book to address these problems. I’ve tried to introduce the language gently, so you won’t get lost in a wilderness of jargon. Many of the examples and problems are easy, some take work, and a few are designed to make you think hard.
If you complete one chapter per week, you’ll get through this course in a school year. Bu don’t hurry. When you’ve finished this book, I recommend Calculus Demystified by Steven G. Krantz and Advanced Calculus Demystified by David Bachman for further study. If Chap. 29 of this book gets you interested in differential equations, I recommend Differential Equations Demystified by Steven G. Krantz as a first text in that subject.
