What is the Best Book for Understanding AP Calculus?

[Tensaiga]

Hello everyone, our school has a sucky ap-calculus book. Well it's either that the book's sucky or I'm just too dumb to understand the material, so anyone know an easier book to understand for ap-calculus?

PS: Our book is great for questions to practice with, but poorly done with the explinations.

Thanks.

 

[d_leet]

What book are you using? If it's the Larson, Hostetler, and Edwards book then I don't blame you for not liking it, my school uses that book for all of the ap calculus classes and I used it at my high school after having taken Calc-2 at a local university and was taking Calc-3 and really didn't like the way the book presented a lot of theorems and just information in general. For an ap-calculus book I don't think that Stewarts Calculus would be too bad of a choice, but I'm sure others probably have better advice to offer.

 

[FrogPad]

Stewarts is nice. Also, Strang offers his free on the internet in PDF form, so you could at least check it out and see what you think (and purchase if you like it).
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/resources/Strang/strangtext.htm

 

[EbolaPox]

If you're studying for the AP Calculus AB or BC exam, then I like Larson, Hostetler and Edwards the best, although some of my friends prefer Stewart's. However, for an AP course I highly recommend getting either the Schaum's Calculus or Barron's AP Calculus Review book, those can be really helpful. Schaum's Calculus is full of thousands of worked out examples. Most of my classmates that I tutored liked the Schaum's book better than our textbook (Larson).

 

[Tensaiga]

Schaum's 3000 solved Calculus problems?? is that what you meant? oh and our book is called: "Calculus: Graphical Numerical Algebraic" the 2003 eddition, the Authors are : Finney, Demana, Waits, and Kennedy. It's an OKAY book, just lack explanations, and the questions are though too! aww... anyways, I'm goona say thank you to all of you, it's been a great help.

 

[Tensaiga]

OH by the way, does anybody know what the ap exam is like? is it hard?

 

[Mr. Beags]

The BC calculus test wasn't all that hard, but when after completing the material by the end of march, we had a month or so to study for the exam. Some of the problems click, some of them don't. If you know the material and are a reasonable test taker, you shouldn't have a problem with it.

 

[mathwonk]

from what you said, that your book is good on questions, poor on explanations, that's what ap calculus is all about.

so I guess the problem you are having is you want to understand the material, which is not the focus of the stupid ap program.


i.e. almost any routine book is fine for ap prep, but to understand the subject you need a good book, like courant.