<p>I'm a sophmore this year and i took Functions, statistics and trig as my math class, i was wondering if going into ap Calculus AB next year would be too hard or should i take Pre-Calculus first</p>
<p>If you covered Trig well, I would imagine you would be fine in AB.</p>
<p>After taking AP Calc AB this year, I really don't see much of a point in taking pre-calc. Sure it's nice to get a little more experience, but you learn everything that you learn in pre-cal in either Algebra II or Calc AB. I wish I had just taken AP Calc my sophomore year.</p>
<p>I agree, Pre-Calc was basically just reiterating all I learned the second half of Alg2/Trig. It probed a little deeper for our school on subjects such as 3-D vectors, matrices, and probability, but if you're pretty confident about your math skills I think you'd do fine in Calc AB.</p>
<p>Hmm, the Pre-Calc that I took freshman year actually covered the Calc A portion, so we went to BC after.</p>
<p>But probably because that was IB Pre-Calc...</p>
<p>pre-calc [and discrete] here covers a lot of stuff that's not covered in calc (bc).</p>
<p>there were nice things like infinite sums, consecutive sum, induction, de Moivre, et cetera.</p>
<p>oh dear god, did you just call de Moivre nice? haha but seriously sonar's post actually made me remember that there were more things than i previously mentioned that precalc didn't cover, especiallly in second semester. how essential these subjects are for taking calc, however, is debatable. perhaps you could try taking precalc over the summer?</p>
<p>de Moivre is cool, at any rate. You always end up with a page of heavy calculuations, and it's always cool to look back on your work later :P</p>
<p>I didn't cover Precalc at all in school (I semi-self studied during the summer), and jumped straight to Calc BC. I'm doing fine, though I had to pay the price of not memorizing trig identities properly. I'd just suggest understand limits first before you get into calc. Limits totally killed me in the beginning as I wasn't prepared at all for them and I had a hard time adjusting to them.</p>
<p>I'd say, get to know these at least before getting into calc:
Trig identities (memorize them!)
Limits (if you could, learn l'Hopital's rule before doing limits, they make your life SO MUCH easier! I didn't learn it in the beginning because I didn't know it existed. Meh)
Polar coordinates (for BC)
Series (for BC)</p>
<p>you don't need a lot of it to do calc, but it's greatly to your benefit (overall mathematics education/understanding).</p>
<p>and yes, de Moivre is nice :)</p>