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Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking for a good calculus book. I was curious if this worked well, and I found:

1) It costs $300 for a paper copy 2) There are no previous. I have no idea if it's actually illustrated

I'm looking for something which is intuitive, and illustrated. A lot of pictures, good example, and perhaps less math and text (in this case, assuming the educator will be talking through most of this, and the learner doing things together).

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Calculus Made Easy is exactly what you are looking for. http://calculusmadeeasy.org/

Thank you!

Don't let the domain name fool you, this is not a calculus textbook. It's a topology textbook. It looks like an awesome topology textbook and I think I'll buy it, but I don't think it's what you're looking for.

I don't really have a suggestion for a good calculus textbook. My school used Stewart and it's okay. I'm also, apparently, a huge math nerd and sailed through those classes; thus I don't think my opinions are terribly general.

But in my experience, learning calculus must come hand in hand with tons of exercise. Worked solutions are really crucial for a good book for self-directed study.

It's less directed self-study as tutoring and mentorship.

My experience is a bit different; the trick is to:

1) first expose kids to the general concepts

2) build them out in as broad a range of contexts as possible, slowly and gradually. Write some code. Do some engineering problems. Etc.

3) Go back and formalize it once the intuition is there

The earlier you start, the better. But you want a different calculus book for a college student, as for a high school student, as for a middle school student, as for an elementary school student. The earlier you go, the more you want pictures and intuition (and the more time you then have to build out the formalism later).

If it's helpful at all to you, I've had success with the list of books from this website: https://mathblog.com/mathematics-books/

Most of them likely have significant previews on amazon. The ones I was interested in which didn't have previews ended up being available one way or another online, which I used to assess whether they'd be worth it for me or not (instead of wasting everyone's time and energy on ordering a book and returning it within five minutes).

I don't know if they deliver outside the UK but it's listed here for £57.44:

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Topology-Illustrat...

i learned from this back in college:

https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-4th-Michael-Spivak/dp/091409...

one of my favorite text books ever. (tho it was paired w/ one of my favorite teachers ever, which i'm sure helped a lot.)

I think this would be a good book in a year or two. For now, if I can introduce basic concepts like slopes, derivatives, limits, and similar, simply and intuitively, that would be ideal.

Thus far, my favorite is Cartoon Guide to Calculus.

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