Book excerpt: This book is for instructors who think that most calculus textbooks are too long. In writing the book, James Stewart asked himself: What is essential for a three-semester calculus course for scientists and engineers? ESSENTIAL CALCULUS, Second Edition, offers a concise approach to teaching calculus that focuses on major concepts, and supports those concepts with precise definitions, patient explanations, and carefully graded problems. The book is only 900 pages--two-thirds the size of Stewart's other calculus texts, and yet it contains almost all of the same topics. The author achieved this relative brevity primarily by condensing the exposition and by putting some of the features on the book's website, www.StewartCalculus.com. Despite the more compact size, the book has a modern flavor, covering technology and incorporating material to promote conceptual understanding, though not as prominently as in Stewart's other books. ESSENTIAL CALCULUS features the same attention to detail, eye for innovation, and meticulous accuracy that have made Stewart's textbooks the best-selling calculus texts in the world. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.