OER Textbooks


Important Update for Fall 2020


This page will no longer be regularly updated. As of July 23, 2020, all of our open textbooks in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, as well as links to additional open textbooks from external sources, will be housed on our new open textbooks server.

The new server can be found at opentext.uleth.ca.

The links and files on this page will be retained for the 2020-2021 academic year. Eventually this page will redirect to the new server.


I have customized available open-source textbooks for several of our mathematics courses. This page provides links to free textbooks for courses at the University of Lethbridge. In each case the books have been customized to fit as closely as possible with the course curriculum as mandated by the Academic Calendar. This page will be updated regularly as changes are made to the texts, and whenever one of the texts is adopted for a course.

Each textbook is available in a colour format, intended for use as an ebook on a laptop or tablet, and a greyscale format, which has been optimized for printing. (Many of the colour graphics use blue and red to distinguish different graphs, etc. If you print the colour version on a black and white printer, these two colours will be indistinguishable. In the greyscale version, different shades of grey have been used in place of the colours.

Note: Most versions (colour and black and white) are available only in PDF format at the moment. I regret that this is not ideal from an accessibility point of view, but it is a consequence of the LaTeX language used to produce the books.

APEX Calculus in HTML

Note that the current HTML version does not match the PDF versions exactly. The PDF texts have been modified from the original APEX Calculus to better match our curriculum, and add Canadian spelling. The HTML corresponds to the original APEX Calculus textbook, but represents a more up to date version of the book.

A number of small errors and typos have been fixed during the development of the PreTeXt version. The PreTeXt HTML also supports a number of nice features, such as embedded video, and interactive 3D graphics (in later chapters). Coming soon: interactive homework, and a built-in calculator.

Precalculus Review

This text is not intended for any course, but to serve as a resource for calculus students needing to review algebra, functions, and trigonometry. At 200 pages, it is longer than the typical review chapter in many calculus textbooks, but shorter than a complete precalculus textbook.


Math 1010

The Math 1010 textbook contains chapters on both calculus and precalculus. There are two versions of the Math 1010 textbook; the primary difference between them is the length of the precalculus chapters. The abridged version uses the material from the Essential Precalculus textbook, while the unabridged version contains almost all of the content found in the Stitz-Zeager textbook. The abridged version has been adopted as of Fall 2017.
The unabridged version has been retained for reference purposes.


Math 1410

The Math 1410 textbook has been updated for Fall 2017 with some new content, and a reorganized table of contents. Systems of equations now appear before matrices. The previous version can still be produced should anyone want it.

Note: The Math 1410 textbook has not been updated for Fall 2018. The excellent textbook by Keith Nicholson has been made available as an Open Education Resource by Lyryx Learning, and will be the textbook in use for 2018-2019.


Math 1560


Math 1565


Math 2560


Math 2565


Math 2570


Math 2580


Additional information



The primary source material is the APEX Calculus textbook, by Hartman et al. You can visit their website to get more information on their project, or to access the original versions of the texts. (The books here have been customized to fit the University of Lethbridge courses.)

I have also made extenstive use of the text Precalculus, by Stitz and Zeager for the Math 1010 textbook. For Math 1410, I have also used the textbook Matrix Algebra by Gregory Hartman (lead author for the APEX texts).

All of these textbooks are open source: the LaTeX source code used to generate them was made publicly available by the authors above so that people like me could edit them. (So feel free to send them a "Thank you"!) In keeping with the spirt of this philosophy, I have re-posted the source code for these texts. If you're interested in customizing the texts, the source is available on GitHub.

New for 2018:


APEX Calculus Version 4 has been released, and a chapter on vector calculus has been added. As a result, we're now able to offer OER textbooks for the entire Calculus sequence, including Calculus IV (Math 2580).