Thursday, October 17, 2013

Calculus 1: Extra Practice With Derivatives



Awesome Set
This is essentially an extension of Jason's Calculus 1 & 2 Tutor DVD set. It covers just differentiation. There are no integration problems on this set. This will be especially helpful for those whose school splits differential calculus and integral calculus into two different courses. It covers some differentiation techniques that Jason did not have time to go into in his original set like implicit differentiation and differentiation of exponential and logarithmic functions. He also spends a lot of time on Related Rates, which in my opinion were (along with optimization problems) the most difficult part of Calculus I. By the time you get through the related rates examples you will know how to do most of the problems you will come up against in your homework and almost anything that can realistically be asked on an exam.

He also has several additional examples using all the differentiation rules, from basic polynomial differentiation to the product, quotient and chain...

MathTutorDVD.com Extra Practice with Derivatives DVD Set
The DVDTutorDVD.com DVD set "Calculus 1: Extra Practice with Derivatives" presented an excellent adjunct to the Calculus series. The sections regarding "Implicit Differentiation" and "Related Rates" are worth the price of the set in of themselves. Having taken Calculus back in the stone age and again at the local community college after retiring from the military I always found those topics problematic....once I worked thru the examples with Jason I found myself asking "What was so hard about those problems?" Along with another reviewer's comment I look forward to a similar "Extra Practice" with the integral part of calculus!

Dino Papas
Colonel U.S. Army Retired

Excellent tutorial on getting your arms around differentiation.
This is an excellent tutorial for those of us who want to get the techniques of differentiation down to a routine. Notice I said techniques. So if you are a math major be aware that there is no theory here. There are no proofs of theorems as to WHY the techniques work. That, as stated by the instructor, is NOT the goal of this set. For those desiring proofs etc I recommend "Calculus: The Classic Edition" by Earl W. Swokowski.

I found this series to be superb for learning AND doing the various methods of differentiation. The best way I found to really get things down was to view a section, say on the Chain Rule, then use REI's 'Calculus Problem Solver' text to do the exercises. I also found that actually plotting the original function AND the first and second derivatives alongside using GeoGebra made the most sense for me. This way I actually got to SEE how powerful the idea of differentiation was.

My math skills are meager at best and Jason's teaching...

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