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Ordinary Differential Equations Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Best intro book
Comment: I needed to refresh my DEs since I was out of college for some years. I regret that I never looked at this book when I was in college. Simply the best book on this. Unlike most other books, it is a lot more applied and it makes sense better. Since DEs works best when you know the purpose of the equation, the approach is the best to me. It does have a good amount of theory as well.

If you are looking for just more theory-based, this is not the book then. But applied concepts are the most interesting to me. Another interesting thing is that the amount of examples in this book will definitly drill down the theory.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: useful book on applied ordinary differential equations
Comment: This is an old, elementary textbook on ordinary differential equations presented in the format of lessons. It is clearly written with the student in mind and has a lot of elementary applications. Students who are studying this subject for the first time will have no difficulty with the book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: If only I had this book twenty years ago ...
Comment: I feel compelled to write a review even though many others have already written in praise of this book. The ultimate accolade: If only I had this book when I was an undergrad taking differential equations, man I would have been the star student! In a misguided quest for "purity", I chose the math department's ODE course, and at the risk of offending mathematicians (for whom I have the utmost respect), all the talk about Wronskians was about the only thing I remembered of the course, only to find later that they are almost completely useless (at least in physics, am I wrong?). Heavenly thanks for Tenenbaum and Pollard, now decades later, I finally understand what differential equations is all about.

The only small criticism is the number-labelling (sp?) of almost everything makes for some clutter in the text. Otherwise, as many have said, this book is VERY WELL ORGANIZED and super for self-study. I have purchased two copies, one for my library and one for my 10-year old daughter whom I hope will find it as attractive and interesting as I did.

Finally, once again thanks to Dover for re-pubishing at reasonable cost so many great books, among which is this particularly outstanding volume. Maybe some sort of prize or recognition should be given to Dover for their contribution to the spread of knowledge.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Book Was Composed by the Old Wisdoms
Comment: I certainly enjoy reading this book.
An excellent applied mathematics text book for engineers and scientists.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very useful for an intro course
Comment: In an Intro to ODE course I took, we used the Edwards and Penny book merely as a reference for exercises and concepts. Most of the instruction was done primarily from the instructor's own books and from what he felt was more useful for the class.

Trying to read through the E.&P. book was painful at best, and useless at its worst, so this text became invaluable to say the least. This book does the job where the E.&P. book did not, to top it off it has plenty of exercises and detailed solutions for sample problems. This text covers about 70% of that course. It falls short of 5 stars because although the material in this book is presented with detail and clarity, its approach to an ODE course is outdated. Modern topics such as Fourier series, exponential matrices, systems of 4 or more equations linear nonlinear or dynamic, are things that are brought up in a typical ODE course taught today which are not mentioned in the book(I assume this was considered too difficult to solve by hand in the age when math software for the freshman was nonexistent).

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