Books or Tutorials that explain Calculus from a programming perspective

Question

K I'm a self taught programmer and been so for a couple of years. But in order to go beyond the programming scab work (entry lvl, Tester, Web Dev, Commercial App Dev; of which I am more than grateful for) and go beyond conventional programming gigs. (I.E. R&D, Embedded Devices, Scientific Computing and the like ) I'm going for a BS in Computer Engineering. However I'm not all that great in the Calculus Department. I've taken Calculus 1 before and had to drop because of a job opportunity. But while I was in it I gotta say stuff like the Chain rule for derivatives and the like was really kicking my ass. So it seems I have a long way to go as far as the maths in school. (although Discreet Math does look fun) Learning by relating concepts known to concepts unknown seems to work well for me and I was wondering if there was any recommended materials that would provide good self study supplemental material for the time when I have to take Calculus classes again.

Answer 1

There is simply no better book to learn calculus from than Stewart's Calculus, period. It is not aimed at programmers, but it will give you a thorough grounding in the principles. [Spivak's calculus is good, but not so easy to learn from, and it takes a more theoretical standpoint. I wish I'd had Stewart's calculus when I studied it]. I have a copy of Stewart's Calculus to hand; it's always the first place I look things up!

There is an accompanying web site here.

Have you looked at the free offerings at MIT OpenCourseware, for example: 18.085 Computational Science and Engineering I

Answer 2

Calculus is actually a continuous world, Programming happens on the digital computer (discrete world), so I think you cannot learn seriously calculus by considering only the discrete world, although some concepts in calculus can be better understood by considering the discrete case