Self-Study Calculus Course Outline: A Guide to Pacing and Topics

[RyanSchw]

Greetings everyone.

I’m interested in spending some of my free time this summer trying to teach myself Calculus in preparation for college this fall. I spent a great deal of time searching for used textbooks on amazon.com and decided to go with “Calculus” 7th edition by Larson Hostetler and Edwards. It seemed to be less widely used than Stewarts, but had consistently positive reviews. At this point I’m not sure if I made the correct choice, but it appears to be a decant text thus far.

Anyway, what I’m asking is if anyone has had experience or a class with this text, who could suggest a syllabus or course outline that I could follow to pace myself as would be required by a standard Calculus 1 class. I realize that I would most likely have to follow the odd numbered questions at the end of each chapter, and I will potentially have to buy the student solutions guide to provide more insight to the answerers.

This is all I’ve been able to find thus far, I’m just curious if it seems like a good guide or not. Also no homework questions are listed, so I’d assume to work on any and all off of them.

SEQUENCE OF TOPICS

Week	Chapter	Section in Text	Topic
1	1	1.1, 1.2, 1.3	A Preview of Calculus; Limits

2	1	1.3; 1.4	Limits; Continuity; One Sided Limits

3	1	1.5	Infinite Limits

4	2	2.1, 2.2	Derivatives; Tangent Line Problem; Rates of Change

5	2	2.3, 2.4	Derivative Formulas; Chain Rule

6	2	2.5, 2.6	Implicit Diff.; Related Rates

7	3	3.1, 3.2	Extrema on an Interval; Rolle’s Th; MVT

8	3	3.3, 3.4, 3.5	Inc/Dec Fncs; First Derivative Test; Concavity; Second Derivative Test; Limits at Infinity

9	3	3.6, 3.7	Curve Sketching; Optimization Problems

10	3	3.8, 3.9	Newton's Method; Differentials

11	4	4.1, 4.2, 4.3	Antidervatives and Indefinite Integration; Area; Riemann Sums

12	4	4.3, 4.4	Definite Integrals; The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus

13	4	4.5, 4.6	Integration by Substitution; Numerical Integration

14	7	7.1	Area Between Curves

	Chapters 1 – 4 and 7.1	Final Exam

This course outline uses the much more expensive 8th (current) edition of the book, but a review for that said that all of the material is the same, it’s just ordered a bit differently.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Kuno]

Although I used a different book, that looks like exactly the same order my first year calculus course went.

I would suggest trying to understand the concepts rather than just spitting out problems.

 

[mathwonk]

i might suggest a little book like elliot gootman's calculus paperback, for self study.those topics you wrote down are absolutely the same as in virtually every cookbook calculus book.