Wasting time with Spivak? Engi major to-be

Robert1986

Yes, the manifolds book is hard. In fact, I'm working through it now. But it is a good book.

-Dragoon-

Spivak is very rigorous and proofs, while Stewart is all application and very elementary. Stewart is a good book for engineers who have no interest in mathematics and just want to memorize formulas and algorithms, but it seems you want a deep(er) understanding.

In that case, I'd highly recommend the Salas, Hille, Etgen: Calculus: One Variable. I'd say its the "middle-ground" between Spivak and Stewart, that is a book that has both proofs and computation, although the computations are harder than Stewarts but the proofs are much more elementary than the proofs found in Spivak. That is the book used at my school for math majors who wanted to learn to do proofs but felt they weren't ready for analysis (honors calculus).