<p>this thread is as old @ hell, but I’ll add my advice (I’m a sucker for these types of threads):</p>
<p>Memorizing the anti-derivatives and being able to do all of the integration techniques you learned in calc II isn’t very important in calc III. The point of the course isn’t to integrate arbitrarily hard functions.</p>
<p>Things that are important:</p>
<p>1) having a good feel for limits–the def’ns of the derivative and integral both use limits. being able to do all of the ɛ-δ proofs isn’t too important (you prob. won’t have to do proofs in calc III), but it is important to understand why the definition is crafted as such. it may be worth reading over that section in your calc text</p>
<p>2) knowing what a derivative is–revisit the definition and make sure you can see how all the other things you know about the derivative (slope, rate of change, etc) follow from f’(x) = lim h->0 [f(x+h) - f(x)]/h</p>
<p>3)knowing that the integral is the limit of the riemann sum as the partitions of the interval you want to integrate get smaller and smaller. this is important because “area under the curve” isn’t a good way to look at some of the problems in calc III. </p>
<p>4) getting straight that integrals and antiderivatives are two separate things, and it is only a theorem that relates one to the other (the fundamental theorem of calculus–which says that evaluating the difference of the anti-derivative at the endpoints gets you the value of the integral). in calc III, you’ll learn and use more high-tech versions of that theorem.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You probably won’t be asked to do them, and you can get by and actually do well in the class without really understanding them, but I find that understanding a little bit of what they are about makes everything else in the class easier. A lot of machinery in calculus uses the notion of a limit . . .</p>