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Comment by scruple | Hacker News Reader

Calculus Made Easy and Probability Through Problems. I'm not sure that I'd have gotten through either my university Calculus courses or Probability and Statistics without these two books. I used them as supplementary material to the course textbooks and homework. They both have a style that is approachable and helped me build an intuition for the material unlike anything else I found.

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I second this suggestion for Calculus Made Easy by Thompson. It's become a bit of a classic...was published in like 1915. Super unique approach to teaching calculus. It's an excellent supplement...lots of good insights. It may be particularly good for people who believe they're bad at math. His style may convince people otherwise.

Also, Vibrations and Waves, by AP French. Granted, this is a physics book, but I appreciate his style so much. He makes use of a lot of geometric methods to solving problems. It definitly expanded my math horizons! His other books are good too.

>Probability Through Problems

First time I'm hearing about this one, thanks for the recommendation. Unlike Calculus or even a typical one semester Statistics course, probability is one of those topics where you need to see a lot of problems to really grok anything. The only way is to see a lot of solved problems and think about why that's the right answer.

Even highly recommended books (e.g. by Blitzstein) don't have enough solved problems, so it's nice to there's a problem focused book out there.

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