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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

The best Calculus book I've ever found is free from MIT.

https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-001-calculus-online-tex...

Adrian Banner's The Calculus Lifesaver is an excellent companion text as well. It's not really a textbook, but it's a great reference to help you alongside it that's written in a way meant to be accessible to introductory students.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8351.html

Adding to this thread, Paul Dawkin's online notes really helped me get through Calc 1-3. There's also notes for basic algebra & differential equations.

http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

Made account to reply:

I got this book at a used bookstore for $10 as my first calculus book, I read the entire thing over a week long vacation.

It was sweeter than candy, I have not read a better non-fiction book in my entire (18 year old) life.

Welcome to HN! I feel hopeful when I see passionate comments like this from newly minted adults :)

Stewart, Calculus, at a mere $285. Or like $5 for the fifth edition. He's very readable.

Strang is a fine lecturer, especially his Linear Algebra videos. But Linear Algebra Done Right is much better than Strang. MIT, Stanford and Berkeley agree on this one thing.

http://www.linear.axler.net/

The abridged version sans proofs is available in PDF:

http://linear.axler.net/LinearAbridged.pdf

I've read significant amounts of both, and I don't think Axler is better than Strang or vice versa. They teach the material with a different emphasis and interpretation.

Having read both, my vote is with Axler over Strang. It may be because I read Axler later, but I found it more intuitive and riper for generalisation.

This may be the best book and it's great that you can download it for free, but it's scanned, and that makes it horrible to read. Still I marked it in my book list under math, and hope I'll find the time to read it in the future. I will buy a decent EPUB or PDF then. I don't mind to pay for that convenience.

Your comment prompted me to look at the contents of the online PDFs. They are scanned-in documents, but I didn't find the text too hard to read. To my surprise there were active links to sections of the book from the TOC. Certainly for the free price it's a generous thing to offer.

Lang's "Short Calculus" (a reprint of the 1st edition of his calculus textbook) is a welcome change from those 2234th edition doorstop textbooks that make calculus into a boring parade of examples, where the goal of the game seems to be becoming an ace at pattern-matching.

More recent, more idiosyncratic but quite nice is T.W. Körner's Calculus for the Ambitious. I could see a motivated high-schooler learn calculus from this.

Thank you for sharing this.

I used calculus book that written by Mathematics department of my university. Beside that, I read Calculus book by Purcell et al. [1]. This book is a good choice for supplement and exercise.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Differential-Equations-Dale-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy

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