Reddit reviews Essential Calculus: Early Transcendentals - Standalone Book

This is good for many books. There are two types of textbooks:

• The bullshit $300 textbooks that Pearson prints every year, changes a few things around, and the professors go along with the scam by requiring you to have the latest version. This is what's hopefully going away.
  
  
• The old but gold textbooks, written many years ago and never updated. Many professors refuse to participate in the Pearson scam and they prefer these older books. Some of these books are very valuable and great flips, but only because of true supply and demand, not some artificial demand created by Pearson. Example published in 2012: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1133112285

Just wait until you get on campus and go to your first class to purchase any books for that class. Then you will know for sure whether or not you really need the textbook instead of spending a lot of money now on a textbook you won't use at all. You won't be at a disadvantage either since you will probably not use the book at all for the first few weeks anyways, giving you a lot of time to get the right book if you really need it.

If you MUST get a book now, the textbook that most algebra and calculus classes use is Essential Calculus: Early Transcendentals (Amazon here). The demand is very high for this book so if you buy it now and find out you don't need it you could sell it to some other freshman very easily.

Easiest case is just to wait until you really know what book your class uses and if you really need it or not.

It should be this one
ISBN-13: 978-1-133-11228-0

The math dept uses a custom version with black cover (but I think the content is the same). 150A covers chapters 1-6.
The name is Essential Calculus: Early Transcendentals, Custom Edition 2E, Stewart
Also, your professor probably will use Webassign.

It's this one! http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Calculus-Transcendentals-James-Stewart/dp/1133112285