Has anyone used this text in a course?

[Taiyo Inoue]

I am an math instructor currently using Active Calculus in Calculus 1 course.  There have been a few negative grumblings about this text from the student so I've looked for alternatives which meet the following criterion:

1. High quality instruction for students.

2. Open-source and free.  (by the way, there is a CSU-wide (California State University - 23 campuses) mandate to use digital textbooks.  Of course, all the usual ethical considerations apply).

3. Ample exercises with solutions.

It's easy to see that 2 and 3 are met by Community Calculus' text.  Less clear to me is how students react to it in practice.  Any comments?

Taiyo Inoue.

[Pete Wolfy Hanson]

I've been using this text in conjunction with Saylor.org's calculus classes, and always end up turning to it when I need to understand something that is confusing in the other materials, or when I need additional practice problems. It's not that the explanations are more detailed or easier to read; it's more a case of finding the examples and exercises to be more helpful to me than other sources.

My main complaint about the text is that the layout is sometimes difficult to read; there's little difference between the plain text and the embedded equations. This is especially an issue when dealing with complex proofs and examples.

I should point out that I use a hardcopy of the text - I found the online text inconvenient, but that's generally true of all online textbooks I've used.

I've filed a number of bug reports with David, but that's not really an issue - every text has errors. At least David provides an address where bug reports can be sent, and he has been very responsive in confirming each of the bugs I filed.

[John S Wolter]

I noticed ...

...a CSU-wide (California State University - 23 campuses) mandate to use digital textbooks.  Of course, ..
..."all the usual ethical considerations apply"

What issues ethical arise in this context?

[Nick Rawlings]

I'm using the text for self learning and it is an excellent resource.  I've briefly attempted the seemingly popular James Stewart texts but found the explanations too brief though the accompanying graphics look pretty.  The Gilbert Strang text book at MIT was good but densely packed.  I found Mr. Guichard's text very well spaced and formatted.  The explanatory text was easy to read, comprehensive and is what immediately hooked me in to start doing the exercises. It is a gentler introduction than the other texts I mentioned.  I also really liked that the exercises had just the final answer so that I could spend time working through the solutions and reworking them when I got the wrong answer.