With a week to go in Calculus II, I needed something to supplement my course's required textbook in order to be successful in the course. The textbook for the course seemed to focus too much on reinforcing concepts from previous chapters at the expense of learning new concepts. For example, when learning Sequences and Series, my course's text would put in challenging integration by parts of trig functions when demonstrating how to use the integral test for evaluating the limit. It is great to have challenging exercises to reinforce technique, but I would prefer a few more less challenging problems that demonstrate new concepts before making them more challenging.



By enormous contrast, Prof. Banner's book is concise and to-the-point when explaining new concepts. When there are prerequisite skills needed, he cross-references earlier parts of his book. In his introductory material, he has a table of what sections to focus on in case you have an upcoming test (this is what saved me).



After checking this book out at my university library, I went to his website and discovered several videos that summarize his book. The videos are in the same style that you might find at MIT's Open CourseWare site. The fact the Prof. Banner and Princeton University put these videos out to the world for free is the full reason I decided to purchase his book. It is least I can do to thank him for his talent and selflessness.