[ecshafer]

Your issues seem to be algebra. I recommend Khan academy personally and just working through all of the highschool math that he goes over. I found his stuff when he was still just a guy on youtube back when I was in the same position as you. Studying calculus, did fine in high school, but my school was not good and totally unprepared me for actually studying math, skipping over a lot of those fundamentals. So often I would have a professor or TA take a complex equation, show an "obvious trick" that we "knew from algebra" and it would be the first time I ever saw that in my life. There is really no other solution than to study and relearn algebra, geometry and trig yourself as you learn calculus.

[Yhippa]

I remember taking a graduate level cryptography course several years ago and relying on Khan Academy to grok the fundamental concepts.