I never thought I would see the day when Manga would be used to educate young minds. Actually, I lie – it’s perfect and I wish I’d had it while I was in school! The folks at No Starch Press agree, and recently they released their latest addition to their collection of learning Manga.

“The Manga Guide to Calculus” sees you learning alongside Noriko, a junior reporter for the Asagake Times. She needs to learn Calculus so that her boss Mr. Seki will give her all of the opportunities she needs to get journalistic fame and glory! Mr. Seki teaches her (and us) how to work out calculus problems by using examples from real-life such as probability, supply and demand curves, the economics of pollution, and the density of shochu (a Japanese liquor). Noriko struggles but she overcomes it eventually, and the goal is that you will too!

Here we have an excerpt for you to view: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18171088/The-Manga-Guide-to-Calculus-Excerpt

Some other things you will learn in “The Manga Guide to Calculus”:

• Use differentiation to understand a function’s rate of change
• Apply the fundamental theorem of calculus, and grasp the relationship between a function’s derivative and its integral
• Integrate and differentiate trigonometric and other complicated functions
• Use multivariate calculus and partial differentiation to deal with tricky functions
• Use Taylor Expansions to accurately imitate difficult functions with polynomials

This particular manga was written by Hiroyuki Kojima who has a PhD in Economics from the Graduate School of Economics, Faculty of Economics, at the University of Tokyo. He has worked as a lecturer and is now an associate professor in the Faculty of Economics at Teikyo University in Tokyo, Japan.

No Starch Press have a myriad of other learning manga guide subjects which include Statistics, Databases, Electricity, Physics, and Molecular Biology. To find them online, visit http://www.nostarch.com/. To purchase “The Manga Guide to Calculus” you can buy directly from No Starch Press, Online at O’Reilly Media, or at your local bookstore (and give them the ISBN 9781593271947 if they don’t have it – they should be able to order it for you!) for the price of $19.95 USD!