Reddit reviews Calculus

Get a good, straight-forward book. $12.92 +shipping, you cannot beat that.

Once you have your book, take it to the library with a calculator and a notebook, find one of their economy-sized sensory deprivation chambers that contain nothing but a desk and a florescent light, and just work through problems until your brain is fried. Do this every day. You learn math by using it, not by watching other people use it.

After that get a better book and do the same thing. Repeat as necessary. Use Khan Academy for when you get stuck, not to learn new ideas. Anybody can sit down and watch 20 hours of videos on the internet (well, not anybody... I can't, I get too distracted on the computer), but you're not going to learn anything if you're not working through any problems on your own.

What text are you using?

Edit: Most calc II or multivariable textbooks that I've encountered (e.g.: this one, this one, this one, or this one) are full of examples, problems, and sections dealing with physical applications, if that's what you mean by outside the classroom.

From what I recollect, Calc II was mostly about developing facility with integration techniques, with some extensions of the concept of integration to boot. Although some of the material may seem to be of little relevance, think of it as an important stepping stone. It is preparing you for some super interesting subjects (like line integrals on vector fields!) that are used to model physical systems.

Does your Calc II text book not cover Calc III material as well? Most books tend to be about 800-900 pages and cover the entire calculus curriculum.

I don't have any good recommendations because they're all pretty much the same to me (with only minor idiosyncrasies). The book that the schools use is largely based on the contract they have with various publishers, and not because it is demonstrably better in any qualitative way.

This was the book I used (well, I used the fourth edition), and older editions are super cheap if you look around for them. I like(d) it just fine, and I still pull examples from it for my students because it isn't the book that they use.