Essential Calculus Skills Practice Workbook

TL:DR - Pros: Good for introductory students, and self-study review. Keypoints per section, and execute. Mistakes? Here's EXACTLY why!Cons: No laborious exposition on history/theory/definitions needed for later courses, BUT reminds you of algebraic/geometric 'theory' to show you why your problems are erroneous.Review:This is a great primer for someone that's starting Calculus or has already done classes and completely forgotten everything.It gives provides about a half-page of notes and keypoints, as if you just got done with the lecture.I remember in college getting so frustrated getting erroneous answers even using Stewerts Solution manual, chegg, wolfram alpha, AND the internet, and I would still be left clueless, distraught, stressed, and agrevating having to spend so much time to understand what I was doing wrong.This small booklet has got you covered!The book's notes and solution lets you know exactly what they're doing, even the 'trivial' algebra/trigonometry, which was the bane of me, and often provides the most enlightening.This book always lets you know "hey remember that weird obscure algebraic principle your teacher told you 4 years ago and spent 45 seconds covering in-class". Well here's why you use it, and how it relates to being operated under derivatives and integrals.Which I think is actually super useful for Mathematical Proofs courses later on, as people tend to have forgotten all the juicy bits and pieces of algebra and trig which this small booklet reminds you of.The book gives you the 'lecture notes' as if you just got out of class and says "GO!".The solutions give you such clear guidance for every step, and gives you the "why" did you just do that step "how did you do that" - 'this algebraic property/identity'The problems are also unique to give you new ideas to think about, as opposed to the 50 same original problems that you get tired and tedious of and 5 random extremely tough problems that you have nothing to connect them to.This book doesn't go over the theories and proofs, and history, etc, blah blah blah, that textbooks use to fill up the pages and bore the student to death to even attempt to read, let alone do the problems.Gives you the 'lecture notes' and says "GO!".The solutions give you such clear guidance for every step, and gives you the "why" did you just do that step "how did you do that" - 'this algebraic property/identity'The problems are also unique to give you new ideas to think about, as opposed to the 50 same original problems that you get tired and tedious of and 5 random extremely tough problems that you have nothing to connect them to.This book gives you unique problems, that give you progressively harder ideas to work with. Definitely not some of those crazy problems in textbooks, but it gives you the experience to tackle those head on.This book starts slightly ahead of College level Material at derivatives curriculum starts at limits. So I'm surprised someone said it's only useful for highschool. The book picks up roughly where my Pre-calc Honors class ended in Highschool.This gave me an excellent crash course and refresher in Calc to begin Real Analysis/Advanced Calculus! If you're a beginner calc student or advanced self-study looking for a review, this is your golden ticket! An absolute steal for $10.Skip your lunch buy this book!

(This is Andrea not Craig)Chris McMullen’s books helped me fill the gaps in my math knowledge so that I could earn my teaching certification through the ABCTE program.My children are now all in school, so I wanted to get back to work full time and I like subbing. When ABCTEs certification was approved in my state I could afford the math teaching qualification— great, right?I have an applied math degree from MIT so I thought this would be easy. I quickly learned there were massive gaps in my math knowledge. I didn’t know “college algebra” was a thing. The syllabus provided by ABCTE was poor and correlated badly with the questions on ABCTE practice exams, which ranged in difficulty between k-12 material and the type of math my pure math major friends studied. I had a huge amount of work to do.Fortunately I found Chris McMullen’s books. I believe I’ve bought seven. I worked through them cover to cover and was able to sail through the final exam yesterday.I came up through a school system that taught to the test. In college I could get through with memorization rather than understanding. Profs sold poorly planned books and their TAs rarely took the time to explain why they did things. (Sometimes they were just blindly following macros themselves.) The worked practice problems Chris provides should be the core of any math teaching program. I wish they were around when I was in school!These McMullen books were particularly helpful: Essential Calculus, Challenging Calculus Problems, Essential Probability, Exponents and Logs, Sequences and Series, Essential Trigonometry, Complex Numbers.It’d be great if he’d write a linear algebra one, too.Thank you, Chris! I will be recommending your books to my students.

Must have!!! This made calculus make sense lol. It takes you slowly through the steps and has practice problems with answers. But not only the answers- the steps to help you see where you may have gone wrong. I’m following this author. I ordered this workbook for personal use

This book gives a representative collection of problems that reinforce basic calculus skills. The answers are very detailed and comprehensive. This is a major strong point of this book. There is a concise presentation of concepts before each problem set. I am a retired college math teacher and worked though the problems to keep my mind active.

This is the best calculus book for all beginners, but not for advance students.

As someone with a limited calculus background, I really enjoyed this book! I feel like I gained a solid understanding of the material. The solutions at the back of the book were super helpful, with step by step workup so you can see where you went wrong. I would 100% recommend this book to anyone trying to learn calculus as it does a wonderful job making the subject matter approachable.

I have a bunch of books on this topic that I dig into for occasional refreshing. The problems are fine, great, even, but this book always ends up toward the back of the line when I go to choose one.I've rewritten this review a couple times and it's hard putting my finger on what's missing for me. You're probably too young to remember encyclopedias, but opening this book feels like opening one of them to me. It's math, I know, but this book doesn't give off any spirit. I go back and forth between 3 & 4 stars. If you're looking for a book that serves its purpose yet feels more like a shopping list, this is the practice book for you.

To be a successful physicist, you need to possess world-class mathematical skills. That means FREQUENTLY working ALL maths, from basic to complex, as math is the language of physics, and only practicing during the school year is not enough. This book is an excellent tool to sharpen your math skills, and I recommend it as a physics student myself.