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Your favorite math reference book(s)?
12-28-2017, 04:36 PM (This post was last modified: 12-28-2017 04:43 PM by pier4r.)
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Your favorite math reference book(s)?
Follow up of "Your favorite book (genre: STEM )?" (thanks to the new forum, everyone can still contribute there!)

I have some calculators (although not many as others). I see them and I am pushed to use them, somehow. Often I find problems that I would like to explore by myself, some other times I have no ideas and I fall back on a very old todo of mine: refreshing basic math. Math from, say, school to the math needed to complete an Engineering course. Computer engineering or Electrical engineering. One day (always one day... damn me) I will have to do this todo properly, with proper notes, but until then I pick this or that topic and I do some exercises.

Lately, since our company gave us a safaribooksonline account (see n1), I stumbled upon Precalculus with Calculus Previews 6th Edition, Zill, Dewar (woah it is 92 euro? How can students afford it?)

It is not bad at all. It is not that exhaustive either. For example proofs are missing, or also some explanations of subtleties (the famous "the exercise is left to the reader", that I dislike). The book tends to be practical and it is ok. The exercises are nice but for what I read, they are nothing difficult as well. I like the applications though, that shows how this or that concept can be applied outside the exercises, producing some interest in the reader.

So I would recommend it as reference to refresh some basic math.

Which math book(s), to refresh math or to get deep in some topics would you recommend?

I cannot really recommend any other book because either they are in italian only, especially high school books approved by the Italian minister of education. I liked them but they are unlikely translated in other languages, or I was happy with the notes taken during the lessons. Therefore at the end I used no other reference except some internet searches. Internet communities for those topics were good enough already after 2002, as far as I remember.

n1: I would say that a safaribooksonline account may be somewhat valuable for sysadmin or programmers, but not even that much, at least if one does not have much time to read. For mathematics it is a bit dry. I expected more choice but maybe my searches were poor. Though, I found the "story of e" that is interesting.

edit1: little rant against the google search engine. It indexed the hpmuseum threads in a very curious way because getting useful threads that talk about books using the "book" word is, well, hard. Either this or there were few threads about books.

Wikis are great, Contribute :)
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Your favorite math reference book(s)? - pier4r - 12-28-2017 04:36 PM



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