<p>My grandfather wants to teach himself calc now that he’s semi-retired. I said that if he did, I would learn it too and then go take a Calc class some summer for an easy A.</p>
<p>Now I was in a calc class last semester, but dropped because:</p>
<li><p>The teacher went WAY too fast. You can’t go over three sections in a one hour class period and expect people to get it.</p></li>
<li><p>The textbook was James Stewart, and it was awful. Lots of practice problems, no explanations for them.</p></li>
<li><p>The tests covered stuff we barely went over in the class, which didn’t cover much to begin with.</p></li>
<li><p>The tutoring was almost non-existant. Sure, there were sessions, but they were led by kids taking Calc for the second, third, or fourth time! We reviewed their old tests from semesters past, all of which were F papers, and nobody really could do the problems on their own!</p></li>
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<p>After dropping that class with a grade that was barely passing, I sold the book and an looking for the following:</p>
<li><p>A calculus textbook that explains stuff really well. I don’t care how many practice problems it has, as long as it has enough. More important to me is that the book says how to solve the problems.</p></li>
<li><p>Some software that emphasizes visual learning. I’m looking for a Math Blaster type game, in particular. I had the Geometry one in high school and it taught stuff while being fun. There are many Calc CDs out there, but they have no fun and games on them, which is important to me in educational software.</p></li>
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<p>Hopefully my grandfather and I can both learn this stuff sometime. He never took it in college, which surprises me since he’s an engineer. His math was stuff like analytical geometry.</p>
<p>My college uses Stewart and while they're not awful, they could've better. </p>
<p>My high school used Calculus by Larson, Hostetler, and Edwards (not necessarily in this order). Overall, it's still not perfect, but definetely better than Stewart.</p>
<p>One relevant note is the change in calculus education in recent history. About ten years ago the style in which calculus was taught was drastically changed from a rigorous study to essentially pictures. True rigorous mathematics doesn't mention the word secant lines anywhere near derivatives, only limits are mentioned. Any current text book will give you a ton of pictures to go with this. Older ones won't. Reason I'm mentioning this is two-fold: while these extra pictures and "geometric" explanations can be handy, there are some advanced topics you simply can't do without being rigorous. These advanced topics are currently (typically) not in any calculus sequence but seperated into courses like real analysis. One thought you may want to do is perhaps study it from the older rigorous perspective (but do this only if you're serious about this, as this is a harder perspective than a geometric one).</p>