The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky, seemed like the perfect book for me and people like me to read. Based on Susskind's continuing-education lectures on classical mechanics at Stanford (which are also available here on Youtube), The Theoretical Minimal is aimed at the "ardent amateur," according to the book jacket. The target audience, it seems, would be people with some background in physics and/or calculus -- perhaps many years in the rear-view mirror -- who want to see how concepts and problems in physics are formulated, derived, and solved in all their glory.
I figured I fit the target profile, having taken a year of college calculus at UCLA, a year of high school physics, and one calculus-based college physics course, all between 1979-1981. And, of course, my writing of this blog for nearly a decade reflects my keen interest in physics. If The Theoretical Minimal could help bring back some of my calculus knowledge (beyond simple derivatives and integrals) and help me apply it to physics, that would be great.
It quickly became apparent to me, however, that the book was way over my head. The explanations just went too quickly for me, with too many new terms and symbols for me to keep up with. In fairness, I did find some explanations to be well-suited for my level of understanding (such as that for the Euler-Lagrange equations of motion on page 202). However, that was more the exception than the rule.
Further, the authors do appear to recognize that some readers may find the material highly complex. Key portions of the book are devoted to conceptual/mathematical systems known as Langrangians and Hamiltonians and, on page 158, the authors acknowledge that, "We still have a couple of courses on relativity and quantum mechanics before the real meanings of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian become completely clear."
In retrospect, I think I almost certainly would have learned more had I gone back-and-forth between watching parts of the lecture videos and reading the corresponding sections of the book. I plan to do that when I read the second book in Susskind's series (Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum, by Susskind and Art Friedman). In the meantime, I'm also doing more to bring my calculus back up to speed, viewing online lectures from MIT's Math 18.01 (at this point, I have watched through Lecture 23).