Calculus 2 Book: Advice for Portuguese Students

[reisada]

Hello I am having calculus 2 at university in my country ( portugal ).
The topics are basically double and triple integrals all the way through stokes.
Do you guys have any advice on a book that could help me study this course?
Thank you very much and I am sorry about my english

 

[brocks]

There is a book called "Div, Grad, Curl and All That" that has received favorable mention here, but Calculus II is almost always part of any freshman calculus text, unless it has been split up into smaller volumes. So I think the best thing to do is to get as many cheap used versions of the most popular calculus texts ---- Stewart, Anton, Thomas, Larson, etc., as you can. There are also many free versions on the web, e.g. Strang, Gill, and our own Ben Crowell. When I get stuck, I find that reading two or three different authors' explanations of a topic is usually more effective than puzzling over a single text, even if it's the world's best.

Pure mathematicians prefer the more analytical approaches of Spivak, or Apostol, or Courant, but IMO most people would do better approaching those as their second pass through calculus, not their first.

You can find reviews of all of those texts on Amazon.com, or by using the search feature of this forum.

 

[qspeechc]

Marsden and Tromba have "Vector Calculus" which is not as dumbed down as books like Stewart, but not as rigorous as Spivak Apostol etc., it is somewhere inbetween. In fact, I think books like Stewart are no good for math or physics students. If you want a book that isn't too rigorous, go for Marsden and Tromba.