The Calculus 1 & 2 Tutor - 2 DVD Set! - 8 Hour Course! - Learn By Examples!

Ordered late August. Two day delivery paid for. No delivery. After a series of emails, each one a tag more P.O'oed than the one before....and NONE were responded to. I finally threatened to go to AMAZON to get this resolve. Only THEN was the product delivered.

Approximately THREE weeks after ordering, it was finally shipped out.

The product may or may NOT BE good and of itself, just don't expect to actually GET it before the semester is over.

Well thought out. It's great for those who've been out of school for a while, and those who need help with the fundamentals.

Mr. Gibson is an amazing, patient, and deeply knowledgeable professor. His products is very well done and easy to use. As a father of two sons, I am very delighted that I found an easy source to teach my sons difficult topics very effectively. These DVDs are also good for people who have solid ground in math and physics because they can review their information very quickly. I recommend these DVDs as supplementary material for math/physics classes.

This tutor is very effective at teaching you the very basics on a particular topic. It isn't extremely thorough, but if you're in class one day and have no idea what the teacher is talking about, you can refer to this and be like "of course, thats what he/she meant".

Even better, use this before your lecture and have a headstart on the days topic.

Calculus is one of those things that make you feel either as an insider or an outsider. If you know it, you feel like one of the happy few. If you don't (but know of its existence), you develop some kind of complex against it.

Now, this DVD is made for many different kinds of audiences, including (mainly) high-school students, and (secondarily) freshmen college students in science or economics. I will give my opinion as someone quite different. I am:
(a) a social scientist, and not a hard-science freak at all;
(b) already past 30 years old -- i.e. already quite rigid -- and without a lot of time to spend studying; and
(c) someone who had always been afraid to hold his nose and jump into the deep waters of calculus (and was therefore missing a lot of the cutting-edge work in his discipline, but sour-grape-ly convincing himself that there are different ways to arrive at the same insights, etc).

SO, IF THAT HAD WORKED FOR ME, IT MIGHT WORK FOR MOST PEOPLE.

Well ... this DVD DID WORK FOR ME!!! I immediately stopped thinking of calculus as one of the worst things that ever happened to me at high school... The clue is not in calculus itself, but in the way it is simplified and taught. Gibson is more than just a teacher: he is a coach, and a great communicator of his love for maths.

IN ADDITION, THIS PRODUCES RESULTS QUICKLY: I bought this when it came out, because I needed to urgently re-tool. I was an "informal" political scientist, and I wanted to gain quickly (a) the ability to read technical papers, and (b) some insight into formal models that I could use. In other words, I was not the kind of guy who either felt comfortable with calculus, or who would easily praise a DVD on such things. WITHIN TWO WEEKS OF USING IT AT A RATE OF ONE HOUR A DAY, I HAD ACHIEVED MY GOALS!!! Gone were the days when I'd see a chain rule or a partial derivative and I would immediately turn my head the other way. Welcome are the days when I see it and I want to know more about it!

Of course, watching or even learning this will not allow you to start writing and solving your own models. (For that, you also need to practice a little bit more, by the calc III dvd, and, of course, read some book on theories, both mathematical and of your own science.) BUT THE TRICK IS ELSEWHERE: WATCHING THIS WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO DO THESE EXTRA EXERCISES, AND IT WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO READ THE THEORIES YOU'RE INTERESTED IN.

... TRULY, A GREAT PRODUCT!!!

PS. I can't wait until Jason Gibson publishes an equivalent series on statistics!