However, first year Calculus is totally doable as long as you have a solid high school math background (polynomials, trig identities, etc). I recommend (and I'm not joking) buying the physical textbook and doing every problem--not every problem assigned--every problem in the book. This will take a few extra 8 hour days of work, but practice, practice, and more practice will make you faster and more able to do the test problems. You may not have a physical text book or you may not like the text in which case look for additional books to use. Schaum's Outlines for Calculus at various levels are good sources of problems to practice on and they have the answers to all problems in the back. Do every problem you can and get help to understand the one's that stump you. Do a few hundred more problems than your classmates and you can expect an A. Like golf, extensive practice will improve your test scores.
If you are unsure of your preparation for the course get Schaum's Outlines for the prerequisite course and do hundreds of review problems so you're ready for Calculus.
One other piece of trivial advice is to buy a ream or two of plain copier paper; loose paper always worked better than pads for me because it was less expensive and I could spread out my work. Write on only one side of each sheet, otherwise the flipping back and forth looking for some work you've already done is too distracting. Pages containing final answers to turn in for homework problems can be creased/folded along a vertical axis so they are easy to distinguish from the pages laid out for work on subsequent problems.
A 0.7mm mechanical pencil with a good sized eraser works well for lots of math (although some like yellow wood pencils). I learned to use ballpoint pens for math and engineering at MIT because crossing out is faster than erasing, but I believe that this is a minority opinion.
Usually the hardest thing about calculus is the precalculus. All sorts of algebra and trigonometry problems appear in the course of calculus problems, and if you can solve them reliably and quickly then you can concentrate on the calculus.
I'd recommend buying any precalculus book -- look for used copies of edition n-1 on Amazon, where n is the latest version - and doing the hardest exercises. These will be starred, and/or at the very end of the section. A great way to build up your chops.
You can find the material for both calculus classes in OCW:
- https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-01sc-single-varia...
- https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-02sc-multivariabl...
[1] By "all of calculus" I mean the required calculus classes to get a degree. You can definitely take more theoretical or advanced classes.
Source: I'm an MIT alumni and I guess I took calculus the "MIT style" way
These are the sorts of questions that professors tend to appreciate.