Product Review: The Advanced Calculus 2 Tutor, 14 hour video course

I found the Math Tutor DVD sets when I was in the process of returning to school about a decade ago to get an electrical engineering degree. I had to start over in math, a subject that I was horrible at when I was in college the first time around and was looking for study aids to help me get through the classes. Calculus II is very hard and very involved, especially if you get a very difficult teacher. Jason does a great job at breaking down the problems and walking you through, step-by-step, how to solve them. There is some overlap between what is on this DVD and what is in Jasons Calc I and II tutor. That is mostly the very basic material, however. Also, some of the integration techniques you will need to know if you take a Calculus II class in college is on that DVD set. Different schools will present the "first-year" calculus curriculum in a different order. In my calc I class we got to anti-differentiation/integration at the very end, then in Calc II picked up with applications of integration like area and volume (which is on this set) and then went into techniques of integration (like u-substitution, partial fractions, trig substitution, trig integration, etc), some of which is on this set and some on the previous DVD. So you really want to get both of those to catch everything.

This DVD set is a complement to, not a substitute for going to class and doing homework. For two reasons. First, as Jason states upfront, he does not cover everything you will be exposed to in class. He hits the areas that he feels are the most important. Second, Jason is not picking test and homework problems, and the only way to get an idea of what your instructor is going to focus heavily on is to go. For example, when Jason teaches improper integrals, he takes what I would describe as a less formal approach which will give you the correct answer, but omits some steps that the book (and possibly your teacher) will show. The technical way to do the problems however is the convert the problem to a limit introducing another variable like t and plugging that in as one of the limits of integration. If your teacher is a stickler for the "formal" approach you may get points taken off for omitting that step. An example of something you will spend some time on in class that Jason does not cover here is approximate integration which involves different rules for getting a decimal approximation. In my class, we also spent a chapter on differential equations, getting an introduction to them and how to approach solving some of the more basic types of differential equations.

If you learn all the material on this DVD set well, you will have about 75-85% of what you will need for the final exam. These are great to look over before you start class to get an idea of what you will be doing in class and during the semester if you don't fully understand a concept from the lecture or how the book explains it. They are also great to use as a final review (if you have time) when studying for a final exam. Jason selects problems as examples that range in difficulty level but are usually not as difficult as the hardest problems in the book (usually the even-numbered problems from the end of the problem sets). The examples you get here are most likely the types of problems you will see on a quiz or exam because they generally do not take a lot of time to solve, whereas some of the homework problems you may come across could be the one and only exam problem (if your teacher really wanted to be mean) because it would take the entire time to solve it. Therefore, if your learning style is conducive to learning from taking notes off a DVD presentation, this will be a great investment.