Functions, algebra, and trigonometry, drilled to reflex. The 90% of calculus that's really just algebra, made automatic so the new ideas actually land.
Free 5-lesson preview · $5 for the full 33-lesson workbook
Ask any calculus professor. Students don't fail on the new ideas. They fail on rusty algebra and half-remembered trig. In a typical problem, about 90% of the work is algebra and only one step is the genuinely new idea. If that 90% isn't automatic, the new idea never gets a fair hearing.
Each lesson opens with a picture to build the intuition, then a set of worked problems to drill it, with every answer shown first so you can check yourself at a glance.
Factoring of every kind, exponent & radical rules, negative/fractional exponents, simplifying to final form, complex fractions.
What a function really is, transformations & piecewise, domain, sign-charts & end behavior, composition & inverses, exps & logs.
Lines, parabolas, cubics, roots, absolute value, rational functions, exponential & log, sine & cosine, tangent & reciprocals.
The unit circle, trig equations, the six functions as one rotating point, core identities, and inverse trig.
Rational expressions and solving equations & rationalizing. This is the bulk of the algebra calculus actually throws at you.
What a limit really is, continuity, and the derivative. A first, honest look at the new idea, once the language is fluent.
Every topic opens with an intuition (a graph, a shape, an analogy) so the mechanics have something to hang on.
You can't learn this by watching. Each lesson ends in worked problems with ruled space to solve them, cold and on paper.
Every answer leads with the result, then the explanation, so you can eyeball what you got and study only what you missed.
Read the preview, see if the format clicks, then unlock the full 184-page workbook for the price of a coffee.
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I'm a college student heading into computer engineering. I built Calc-Prep for myself after learning the hard way that what makes calculus hard usually isn't the calculus. It's the algebra and trig underneath it. I designed the sequence, wrote the diagnostic, then worked every lesson in here cold and rewrote the ones that didn't stick. I'm not a professor, and that's the point: I remember exactly where this hurts, because I was standing there recently.
Lessons are authored from standard mathematical canon and hand-checked. Every problem is worked and verified. More at ryanross.org.