
Ask HN: Preparing for university calculus? - math_throwaway1
Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;m in my mid 20s and trying again for an undergraduate degree (I dropped out of my first attempt for medical reasons). As you might imagine, it has been many years since I&#x27;ve studied math and I feel extremely rusty. Does anyone have recommendations for a fairly rigorous pre-calculus textbook or online course?
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mindcrime
Not a "course" per-se, but on Youtube you can find a guy named Professor
Leonard[1], who teaches math at Merced College. He has recorded videos of his
classes and posted them to his YT channel. There is everything from pre-
algebra through Calc III, and he's doing Differential Equations now. There's
also a Statistics class in there.

As a fellow "adult learner who's trying to review some forgotten math", I've
found his videos to be an excellent resource.

I've also found Khan Academy very useful as well.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/professorleonard57](https://www.youtube.com/user/professorleonard57)

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nicholas73
Calculus was broken up into two parts in my university. Part one covered
limits, differentiation, and basic integration. Part two focused on
integrating more difficult functions (I remember little else, and frankly not
sure if most students need part two).

Others experience may vary, but part one was easy in that none of the concepts
or calculations take much practice. I got an A without doing the homework.
Part two was a pain for me because none of the problems you can figure out
during the test (like integrals of weird trig permutations), and I got an D
without doing the homework.

So the good news is that you just need to start and you'll have time to ramp
up. Then just make sure to do the homework (I got an A the next time).

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sgillen
Second Khan Academy as a good resource. The most important thing is that you
practice doing math a lot, don't worry too much about reading the right book
or anything.

