I bought this book for my 3rd grade son to write a paper with, and found myself completly engaged in it. For someone who didn't know much about "The Great One", I am now as big a fan as my son! Tells a lot about his younger years and doesn't just focus on the goals. AWESOME

The book Wayne Gretzky "The Great One" is about a boy that grows up in Canada. He played in the WHL for the Soo Sault Marie Grey Hounds. Then he got drafted by the Edmonton Oilers. After 4 straight seasons they won a Stanley Cup. Then he got traded to the Los Angeles Kings. When he was in Los Angeles they won 3 Stanley Cups. Then in a few years he got traded to the St. Loius Blues. He didn't like it in St. Loius, so for the first time in his career he was a free agent. Then the New York Rangers wanted him, so he went to New York. In 1998 he retired from New York. He is still living in New York. He has 3 children. I nomiate this book to who ever likes famous athletes.

It is hard to concentrate so much information in a single book, covering all of South America from Colombia to Chile. Lonely Planet have tried and have done a good job, but the target was too ambitious... If you are literally running through South America with little time, and perhaps you don't want to carry the weight of too many guides, then do get this book. It is of some use, and offers interesting reading. Yet, if you plan to get to know each country more thoroughfully, you are much better off with Lonely Planet's (or other publishers') single guides on each individual country, and there are lots to choose from.

I have just returned to Norway after a year backpacking around in Latin America (of course accompanied by the Lonely Planet books). I do not claim to be an expert, but I know what I look for in a travel guide!

This edition of the LP South America did not disappoint me. (Please note that I used it only for Colombia, Ecuador and Perú). It is up to date on the information, and as with all the other LP books it is easy to find your way around with it. It includes maps over the big cities, good information about the hotels, restaurants, places worth visiting, and time schedules for bus, train etc.

You have to take into account that this is a guide that is meant to cover the whole South America so naturally it is not as detailed as the guides for each country separate. It is good as an overall guide if you plan to go to more than one or two countries, as you would try to cut down on the baggage you would have to carry around.

As for the prices for hotels and food, the book is not accurate.. But you cannot expect that. It is hard to keep up with all the changes, especially in the Latin American economy, where the inflation is "somewhat" higher than in the rest of the world. So, for prices, do your own research, or at least be prepared for changes! (We usually doubled the prices in the book and that gave us a good indicator of what to expect).

You will find that if you are walking around with the LP book under your arm, many of the local people will approach you and ask you if you need help. Say yes - even if you don't need help! It is a great opportunity to get in contact with the local people!

This book is a must on your travel!

This book is an absolute must for the budget,adventurous,willing-to-stay-in-a-funky-hotel-with-lumpy-beds traveler. In a writing style as colorful as the cover, Lonely Planet helps you plan your trip with concise information on: restaurants (with many references to vegetarian places), lodging, festival dates, nightclubs, local language and customs, safety information and more. Lonely Planet South America can also lead you to out of the way villages and towns where you are thrilled at the sight of a real toilet after a five-hour bus ride which left you covered in dust. Nothing comes more in handy after starving on the long bumpy ride than grabbing your guidebook out of your backpack to find out the best fried plantain stand and cheap posada (inn) in this block-long town. And I was very grateful for those tips the book gave on where to ask for that guy "Juan" who is the only person who sells stamps within miles! From the Amazon to the Andes to the Caribbean, Lonely Planet was there for me. Seeing other tourists leafing through the same guidebook, brimming with over 1000 pages of invaluable information in a small book you can cram in a purse, was always a comforting sight in such different-from-home lands.

...P>I don't have a Ph.D. from Harvard either, but I should be getting one next year.

I have had to teach an introductory calculus course at Harvard that follows the "Harvard Calculus" treatment that originated with this book (though the course did not use this book). It was awful. It is no easier to teach this course than it is to learn from it. Students need to learn calculus first *before* applying it to the various fields they will study.

My College Calculus professor uses this book as a suppliment to provide examples for the class use. Everyone hates the problems as they are vague and lack any explanation on how to solve the problem or even where to begin. It appears to me that someone wrote a book simply to create problems that cannot be solved by the book's explanations. Calculus requires a working understanding of the ideas and concepts of the base math before an sort of obscure application should be used. I would not recommend this book to anyone, unless they already have a good understanding of calculus and wish to delve further into the application of the math to the real world. In that case, buy the book. For the other 95% that are just wanting to learn calculus; go buy a different book that teaches you something first.

In my experience with this text, students either love it or hate it. They hate it because it does not offer a brief overview of the topics, like many more popular calculus text books. Instead "Calculus: Single Variable" requires that a student throughly read many examples as it explains rules and laws along the way. Those who love the text do so because the examples offer a firmer understanding of the concepts at hand, instead of just covering enough material to answer the questions at the end of each section. Although this is a very good text book, it definitely requires patience on behalf of the reader, and may not be the book for students who just want to slide by.

Besides the picture on the front, this book is horrible! I've learned more by personal derivation and experimenting than through this book. The explanations are overly bloated, and include so many approximations and tables that the theory behind this book's ramblings is lost completely. Instead of focusing on theoretical multivariable calculus while introducing, as a short diversion an approximating method, this book builds around a foundation of approximations, which clouds the actual mathematics in the process.

In my opinion, unless theory is ingrained in students' heads from the start, they will never even attempt to understand it. After all, the book gives the theory second priority, so why should students pay any attention to it?

Moreover, in the introduction, the book promises to have problem sets that a student "cannot just look for a similar example to solve... you will have to think." However, after working with this book's homework problems, I've found them to be the exact opposite of this! There are plenty of similar examples for any given problem, and as a result the teacher's role becomes trivial, while at the same time students don't really understand anything they're doing. Not only this, but the problems are overly MUNDANE, and there is too much practice for a single concept. If a student has taken calculus, he can do derivatives, so he should not need 31 exercises to learn how to do partial derivatives.

Capping all this off, there are no truly challenging problems at all in this book. All of them focus on mechanical methods rather than clever application of known theory. The biggest challenge in this book, in fact, is keeping your hand intact as you take 50 partial derivatives, and then hit a problem that says "repeat for the second partial derivatives."

Meanwhile, your fine motor skills deteriorate quickly as you overwork them drawing or re-drawing a graph or table every other problem.

Bravo, Debbie Hughes, you can use Mathematica's graphing capabilities to their fullest. We're all proud of you. Now can you keep them out of your textbook? No one wants to see a billion tables staring them in the face, and then have to copy and change a billion more for homework. That's not a way to learn. This whole textbook is just a way to pretend you're learning.

Waiting to really learn anything from this book is like waiting for Richard Simmons to get married. Trust me, it's not gonna happen, folks.

kubkhan

"This innovative book is the product of an NSF funded calculus consortium based at Harvard University and was developed as part of the calculus reform movement" Beware of Harvard, i.e. reform Calculus. Instead of teaching people about maxima and minima, you show them how to use a calculator to guess. What a load of junk. Nobody learns what anything means, just how to apply formulas, etc. It is a shame what books and authors like these are doing to college mathematics. This book is particularly bad, a whole bunch of fluff, not a damn ounce of substance.

I have to disagree with my fellow Californians and unfortunately agree with someone from New York. This is an excellent foundation overview without the clutter of Anton's and Stewart's books. I found it to be a conveniently carried paperback and an enjoyable read.

This "solutions manual" only offers answers for every fourth question. The most painful part is that the so-called solutions are merely the answers from the back of the text book put into complete sentences; there is NO additional instruction.

Unfortunately, Amazon does not offer any way to properly rate this waste of money.

This book is so pathetically minimal that I award it...1/10 of a star. (It may be useful in starting a fire in your fireplace...maybe). DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS SOLUTION MANUAL! It only includes about every other odd solution, and most of the time, it shows just the (often incorrect) answer. The worst part is, that same answer is usually in the back of the textbook! It is definitely not worth even $5.00, so save your money!