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Calculus the Easy Way

douglas downing

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This ingenious, user-friendly introduction to calculus recounts adventures that take place in the mythical land of Carmorra. As the story's narrator meets Carmorra's citizens, they confront a series of practical problems, and their method of working out solutions employs calculus. As readers follow their adventures, they are introduced to calculating derivatives; finding maximum and minimum points with derivatives; determining derivatives of trigonometric functions; discovering and using integrals; working with logarithms, exponential functions, vectors, and Taylor series; using differential equations; and much more. This introduction to calculus presents exercises at the end of each chapter and gives their answers at the back of the book. Step-by-step worksheets with answers are included in the chapters. Computers are used for numerical integration and other tasks. The book also includes graphs, charts, and whimsical line illustrations. Barron's Easy Way books introduce a variety of academic and practical subjects to students and general readers in clear, understandable language. Ideal as self-teaching manuals for readers interested in learning a new career-related skill, these books have also found widespread classroom use as supplementary texts and brush-up test-preparation guides. Subject heads and key phrases that need to be learned are set in a second color.

404 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1982

This edition

Format
404 pages, Paperback
Published
January 1, 2006 by Barron's
ISBN
9780764129209
ASIN
0764129201
Language
English

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About the author

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douglas downing

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Douglas Downing, Ph.D. teaches economics and quantitative methods and is undergraduate program director for the School of Business and Economics at Seattle Pacific University. He is the author of several books in both Barron's Easy Way and Business Review series. He holds the Ph.D. degree in economics from Yale University.

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4 reviews All reviews
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Ghostkumo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I need to take a calculus class, so I decided to go through this book to supplement the class text. The book is aimed at high school students, but the descriptions are plainly written and written in detail. I'm pretty hopeful that this book will help me learn calculus so I don't end up just memorizing information.
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Aeterna
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Truly the best way to learn calculus on your own. Told in very simple stories, Calculus the easy reduces calculus to a series of obvious algebraic equations.
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PROStefi1000
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This book is quite strong at the beginning. Its explanations are lengthy and detailed, enabling the reader to grasp the algebra of what is going on.

As you move through the book, however, it does get much much weaker. I found myself confused as to how Centers of Mass are to be computed. Its introduction to Differentials is absolutely abysmal and I felt like some of my students(give me the formula!), yet unable to really understand what I was doing. I'm glad this was just a review before breaking into my old textbooks. I do feel that I've learned several tricks and have a better grasp on some ideas (such as Partial Fractions and Trigonometric Substitution) but definitely need a different explanation for the more difficult concepts.

I do like that the all the questions are answered in the back (versus just the evens), but more than once I wanted to know how they got their answer that was totally different from mine, rather than just THAT the answer was different.

In the end, it was good for Calculus 1. I would certainly use some chapters when I tutor in the future.
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TRLS18
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This was a fun book. It's a single variable calculus textbook, but written as a fantasy novel. The quality of the story is nothing remarkable in and of itself (and sometimes gets to feeling awfully childish), but the author uses the narrative structure to present an inductive approach to learning calculus, rather than the traditional deductive approach. Instead of giving a theorem and then demonstration potential applications, we're presented with a problem, and then see the characters in the story work through how they would solve the problem. This both helps to motivate the usefulness of the material, and, by showing where these methods come from, helps students to develop an intuitive understanding of the concepts.
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