Agreed! My copies of Calculus Made Easy and Calculus & Statistics are wonderful references even though they were written before I was born.

Pretty sure that's Calculus Made Easy, a book which I, as a fool, certainly ought to recognize, and yeah, that's the gist of my approach to "scary" topics. "Have lots and lots of people done it? Then I'll likely be fine, because some of those people were assuredly at least as dumb as I am."

“Calculus Made Easy” might help you get back into it. Lots of discussion over the years on it:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=calculus+made+easy

Thanks! Here are some details to past threads:

Ask HN: Links to older resources like Calculus Made Easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272635 - May 2020 (4 comments)

Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257303 - May 2020 (67 comments)

Calculus Made Easy (1910) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18250034 - Oct 2018 (68 comments)

Ask HN: Books Like 'Calculus Made Easy'? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14166466 - April 2017 (8 comments)

Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161876 - April 2017 (189 comments)

Tons, but it really depends on where you're starting. Is there anything in particular you'd like to learn?

Every time I've recommended Calculus Made Easy [0] it's been a huge success. The writing is lively and full of motivating examples, and it's an enjoyable read.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17185577

Is this the LA version of "Calculus made easy"? Because I love that one.

I hope I am not getting downvoted to hell but I always thought Strang was overhyped. I watched his lectures and bought his book and I never felt this is the most accessible way of teaching LA. At least not in the way, people hyped it up to be.

I much prefer Jim Hefferon's LA book for example. No hate towards Strang but I always felt so dumb when I watched or read his stuff after people were raving about it.

There's Serge Lang's Basic Mathematics which discusses algebra and geometry, including a bit of linear algebra. Introduction to Linear Algebra, by the same author is a bit deeper. Those are the textbooks I would pair with Calculus Made Easy.

For slightly less mature students, there's Algebra by Gelfand.

The Internet Archive has scans of the second edition of Calculus Made Easy, from 1914 [1]. The book is also available as PDF and TeX at Project Gutenberg [2].

The calculusmadeeasy.org website does include at least one useful footnote that the other versions don’t: “The term billion here means 10^12 in old British English, ie, trillion in modern use.” [3]

[1] https://archive.org/details/CalculusMadeEasy/page/n3/mode/2u...

[2] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283

[3] https://calculusmadeeasy.org/2.html#fn1