Sage is a computer algebra system (CAS), similar to Mathematica and Maple. It can minimize the need to make tedious calculations by hand, and offers a sort of universal answer book should you need to check your work when no answer known to be correct is available. There are a number of Sage "cells'' in the text which illustrate how it can be used in some common circumstances. These cells can be edited, so you can change the expressions in the cells to get some practice at doing similar calculations.

In this chapter we present an overview of some of the calculus-related capabilities of Sage. If you have not already had calculus, you will need to wait until you cover a particular calculus topic to understand what is being computed in some of the examples. Once you do understand a topic, this chapter can serve as a handy reference for performing calculations with Sage.

Note well that as you go through the Sage cells, some cells may depend on earlier ones; they must be evaluated in order.

1. Basics

2. Differentiation

3. Integration