Differential Equations & Linear Algebra, Student Solutions Manual

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I don't know why the reviews on this are so harsh... I'm a Junior engineering student, and I pretty much hate every textbook I've ever had to purchase for my major. I was actually pleasantly surprised by this Diff. Equations book. Granted it still is a math textbook, so following it is sometimes hard, but the examples given in the book are very helpful, and I was able to do almost all the required homework by working through stuff in the book. My lecturer wasn't the greatest so I was able to get an A in the class with the majority of learning coming from the book. I was annoyed that some of the homework problems seemed to come out of the blue with no similar example in the book, but ah well. I did have the solutions manual to help me out a bit with those (only the odd problems are solved in the solutions) and if it was an even problem, an odd problem before or after would be of similar make so I could find the general way to solve the problem anyway. Yup, not too bad, not perfect, but definitely not a two star book either.

When I first learnt differential equations and linear algebra, it was with texts written in the 60s and 70s. So I turned to this book with interest; wondering what has changed. Well, at the level of the book, most of the material has been known for decades. But one immediate difference is the profusion of diagrams and the increased use of colour. Due in part to improvements in printing technology. It means that current students also have more visual cues to learn from. When one is studying differential equations, this can be quite useful. Also, there is indeed new material here. Numerical methods are prominently discussed in many sections. Due to vastly more common availability of computers. So students are not restricted to handling only those problems that can be solved by hand, to give simple analytic results. The scope of learning has expanded. Now granted, most of the numerical methods in the book were already known in the 70s. But they were usually presented in texts devoted to numerical analysis, for people specialising in that field. Nowadays, it can be used in other branches of maths, like that covered by this book. Along these lines, the authors exhibit an ecumenical attitude towards what computer languages a reader might be familiar with. Example programs are given in Basic and for the TI-89. For symbolic algebra, code is furnished for Maple and Mathematica. They recognise that readers might have different preferences and they try to outreach to as many as practical.