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Comment by svat | Hacker News Reader

> these kind of "calculus made easy" pamphlets

The link is not a pamphlet (unless you read only the linked HTML page). It is an entire book, published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson, and sufficiently well-regarded that it was re-edited in 1998 by Martin Gardner, and (independently) lovingly re-typeset in TeX by volunteers (and also turned into this website). Clearly it serves a need, and is not merely a “trite” pamphlet.

(The edition by Gardner is actually recommended against by some, who see in it a clash of two strong personalities, individually delightful.)

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It's a great book, and one my father recommended to me to get me through the concepts when I was having trouble with the standardised teaching of the day.

It comes down to Leibnitz Vs Newton, and the world has standardised on the notation of one (I forget which). However the notation is a destination when learning it all, and the foundational ideas behind calculus were best explained taking ideas from both of them.

That's what this book does. It takes you through with every simple jumps in logic allowing you to discover calculus yourself and you therefore have the foundations to reason about it yourself. You don't just have to learn the final answers by rote.

It serves a need just not my need!

(As someone who's surprisingly bad at math and trying to undertake a Calculus pre-req to get into university!)

I read Calculus Made Easy about 15 years after my last math lesson, and had forgotten a lot of the mechanics of algebra. I went through Algebra and Algebra II for Dummies before reading it. They're really concise, very easy to read and absolutely did the job for me.

Calculus Made Easy is an amazing book btw, by far the best introduction and much better than the way I was taught at school as it actually builds your intuition.

Ok well thanks for the Algebra book recommendations, will see about working through those first.

> It serves a need just not my need!

Which is fair, but if you believe that you shouldn’t have insulted the work itself by dismissing the value of its content and calling it a trite pamphlet.

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