text: As mentioned, this book is amazingly compact, cramming three semesters of calculus and a bit of ordinary differential equations into just 800 pages. That conciseness also implies that much explanatory material and many illustrative examples are missing.
  
  The authors mention in the preface that "classifiers of calculus books would call this a traditional book. Most theorems are proved or left as exercises to prove..." Nearly every result in this book has an accompanying proof. For those with a serious interest in mathematics, this is a useful resource. For most others, the presence of so many proofs can be overwhelming and probably is a turnoff.
  
  Included with the book is a one-page detachable reference card containing a massive amount of valuable information, including common rules for derivatives and integrals, geometric formulas, a few conversion factors, trigonometric identities and graphs (very useful!), and more. The book also has a three-page comprehensive table of integrals in the inside back cover and a listing of geometric formulas in the front, along with a commemorative timeline and portraits featuring the deceased European males who made calculus possible.
  
  Given all of this, I would highly recommend this book as an 800-page calculus reference text, or maybe as a text in an honors calculus sequence that expects to use the text throughout multiple semesters - then using it saves you money.
  
  But for those who don't have a super-strong background or interest in math, those who are just taking calculus for a requirement or those who have never seen calculus before, or for those who are just plain math-phobic - using this book just doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't recommend it.
  
  For those who are stuck with this book for a course, I'd suggest looking for another book to help you out. One possible book has already been mentioned in another review: Silvanus Thompson and Martin Gardner's "Calculus Made Easy", a book that dates back originally to 1910 (!). I've read parts of it, and the book looks good to me.
  
  I'm sure that there are many other helpful books; try checking your local/university library or looking on Amazon for ideas. An extra calculus textbook that's more student-friendly might be a good idea.
  
  As for the pages falling out, I haven't had a problem with it (I have the 8th edition), but I don't use the book all that much.
  
  I haven't found any serious errors in the text, but I haven't read everything thoroughly, having only used the text for Calc III.
  
  And, yeah, getting the student solutions manual would probably be a good idea
  