Anton Calculus vs Stewart Calculus for HS Students

[Billioville]

If you read this forum for a while, you will see that there is a fairly small number of prolific posters, who always give the same answer to your question, which has been asked a thousand times.

Some posters here are mathematicians, and either never knew (because of their extremely high aptitude) or have forgotten what it was like to be struggling to learn calculus. They dismiss almost all of the most popular textbooks as garbage. Some even recommend Spivak or Apostol as a first calculus text.

But there has to be a reason that Stewart is used by hundreds of universities for freshman calculus, and Spivak or Apostol is only used for honors courses, or for students at the likes of MIT and CalTech. The common denominator for the classes using Spivak or Apostol is that very few students in those classes are seeing calculus for the first time.

Stewart, Anton, Larson, Adams, etc. are all popular texts, and all cover the same material in pretty much the same sequence. They would not keep coming out with new editions, and would not be used in so many universities, if they were garbage. The one that is best for you is the one you find easiest to understand, but I would recommend buying old, cheap editions of several of them (any calculus text written in the last 50 years covers the same material), so if something from one author doesn't click, you can see a slightly different approach from another author. If you skim through any of those texts and just do the drill problems, you won't learn much. If you work hard with any of those texts, making sure you understand all the proofs, and doing as many problems as you can from the end of the problem sets rather than the beginning, you will get a first class background in calculus, and be ready for any second year text.

Excellent observation!

 

[Emmanuel_Euler]

I do have all of them, so I would advise you to go with James Stewart and Soo Tan.

Thank you for the advise.