Essential Calculus Skills Practice Workbook with Full Solutions

(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.

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!

I’m interested in math, not a born mathematician. All through my life I struggled with the texts because they were written for people who were already proficient. This book takes you through the steps one by one.GREAT LEARNING AID. I still struggle, but now I can see where I went wrong because every step is crystal clear. I’m finally getting it. My inspiration were similar persons on the internet saying “I was never good at math until I just worked problem after problem - you have to put in the time!” This book is worth the time.

Bought this to reinforce what I’m learning in class and like other reviewers said, the problems are worked out nicely and show a lot of the intermediary steps. I gave it a four because it only goes about two thirds the breadth of a calc 1 class and maybe one tenth the depth. The worked examples are are great, just very basic. It would be nice to see more depth at least, because someone is likely using this type of book to look at the more complex problems from a different perspective.

Excellent product for anyone attempting to learn calculus

I am very pleased with this book. I haven't studied calculus in a long time was rusty. I'm working my way through the book with what feels like more ease than I had when studying calculus in college. Each problem comes with step by step solutions, which makes it easy to see where you went wrong when solving the problems on your own. This book is clear, and somewhat mechanical, which is to be expected for a practice workbook. But I would encourage those learning calculus to learn read this book first, get the mechanics of how to solve problems and then read another book, if you want more in depth explanations as to why things work the way they do.