Study Aid Review: Schaum's Outline of Advanced Mathematics for Engineers and Scientists

 

This is not really a book that is tied to any one specific course like the other Schaum's outlines are. This is meant to be more like a reference where you can go to look up concepts that you may have forgotten. It is like a condensed textbook that has the key things that you need to know but does not go into a lot of detail about the theory and do a bunch of proofs as a textbook will. Let's face it, we all forget things from class after a while, especially things that we do not use on a regular basis. Most people will be able to remember how to take simple derivatives or integrals, but far fewer people are going to remember how to set up a triple integral or do Laplace Transforms off the top of their heads after they get done with the classes where they have to use them. That is where this will come in handy.

I think the best way to use any of the Schaum's outlines is to use them in conjunction with learning the concepts in class (because they give you far more examples worked out than your book ever will) or as a reference guide once a class is over. At that point, you can use it as a substitute for your textbook because you will not be as likely to need all the detail and rigor of a full-blown textbook by then. It is not something that is going to be useful to teach yourself the concepts from initially. That is because of the lack of detail and the fact that some of the outlines are edited badly and can contain errors. Once you understand the material the errors and typos can be easy to spot, but when you are first learning that is not always the case. I have only glanced through this particular outline so far, so I am not sure how many errors (if any) are in this one. I know some of the outlines have more errors than others, but just be aware if something does not look right when you are working through a problem, it may not be that you don't know what you are doing.