Ordinary Differential Equations: An Essential Guide for Mathematics Students from Dover Publications

Lifetime Learner: Easy to follow. Comprehensive. Nicely organized. The best ODE book I have ever read.

United States on Feb 24, 2024

JunningHuang: There several books I'm using now to study ordinary differential equations: 1) this book; 2) Arnold's book; 3) The book recommended by 18.03 differential equations from MIT. In my opinion, Arnold's book is a bit high level focus on mechanics and geometry, and the book from 18.03 is not concise enough compare with this book.

This book first outline the basic idea and assumption of a theorem, then gives you lots of examples to play around. I think this book would be a good reference if you especially you are an engineering student, try to figure out how to solve a linear non-homogeneous equation. The only drawback of this book is it doesn't include the Fourier series method, but as a trade-off, since the authors are experts of power series, they present more content on Legendre and Bessel differential equations. Overall, I rate 5 stars for this book.

Germany on May 07, 2022

Eder Yair Nolasco Terrón: Lo recomiendo bastante para un curso de ecuaciones diferenciales y se puede complementar muy bien con el Zill o el libro de Espinoza de la UAM, los problemas de aplicaciones son excelentes y da muy buena información para transformada de Laplace y series

Mexico on Oct 30, 2021

Tuomas Hakala: For self-study this book is amazing. Very clearly articulated and well written to a degree that it seems rare in modern text books on any subject. Found it as PDF for free, bought it anyway and haven't regretted for a second.

United Kingdom on Aug 04, 2019

Henrique N. Lengler: I've already done courses on Ordinary Differential Equations, but bought this book to have on my side every time I need to remember something I have already learned, and to learn more deeply topics I haven't understood so well on the courses! And I was surprise with the amount of topics this book covers, it has everything you will need to about ODEs, this is the most complete book you will ever buy for this amount of money, even covers numerical methods.

Brazil on May 17, 2018

finmath: This is one of the most complete book I have read on ODEs. It starts with the foundations and does not skip details of proofs, complementing the theory with many examples and exercises. I think this book is sufficiently versatile to be used by people with different Mathematical knowledge and backHighly recommended to anyone that wants tground. Highly recommended!

Italy on Oct 12, 2017

Anonymous Customer: I've become a fan over the Dover books as a quick pickup for math. They are inexpensive, usually pretty solid technically, and understand that you are probably not a mathematician and need your hand held long enough to find your sea legs. You're busy. You need to know this stuff so you can do something else. You're an engineer of some kind with tight deadlines. You're wearing a black belt with brown shoes. You drink way too much coffee and really need to let your kids know you love them more than you do.

I know your kind. And it'll be okay.

That aside, make sure you have a solid footing on your calculus, because if you didn't do well with calculus, you'll suck with this too. The mistakes just multiply. Again, the authors understand you're not a mathematician, but they know you're not an idiot either and don't need your hand held. If you've got those basic prerequisites (1. Calc 2. Not an idiot) and need to get in the know on DiffEQ, this is a good one.

United States on Aug 30, 2013

John F.: First, some information about myself. I am a sophomore in college. I took a intro differential equations course last semester. I found it frustrating - the course covered many topics but none quite in depth as I would have liked. I am an engineer, and engineers are not supposed to "care" about the theory, only how to apply it, but I have a certain fascination with differential equations that was definitely not satisfied by the class I took. The textbook we used, Boyce and DiPrima, did not help matters. It was convoluted, spending whole pages trying to explain a concept, chock full of referrals to formulas a few pages back, interspersed with pretty pictures. In short, I appreciated what the authors tried to do, but it did not help me understand differential equations adequately. But alas, I digress. This is not a review of Boyce and DiPrima.

Anyway, I began searching around for a book that would let me learn DE's the right way. This book came up in a recommendation, and I decided to try it after reading all the positive reviews about it. I think it does a fine job of living up to its reviews. The material is presented in a very clear, very accesible manner....

United States on Dec 25, 2011

Estefano Palacios Topic: I took ODE this semester, and I was liking the subject until I got to read the textbooks assigned to it. It is impressive how the world is filled with giant text books that are absolutely dull and useless and extremely expensive. Luckly I have always been fond of Amazon, so I searched "Ordinary Differential Equations" and came upon this book, which at first glance looks tiny and unpromising, but trust me, this little beast doesn't only talk about ODE, it takes the subject, makes it its own, and in the most elegant of fashions transmits the knowledge so well that it even if I live in Ecuador and English is only my second language, I could grasp all what was necessary to, not only pass ODE, but to take my knowledge and apply it to computer programming right away.

Trust me, if a book teaches so well that you can go ahead and apply it just like that, it is something special.

Now strictly speaking on it's qualities:

First, the book is a breeze to read, you will not find yourself reading back again through the text because of the lack of good pedagogy, but be aware, the writer does not bother to make you laugh either (a quality most serious books...

United States on Sep 02, 2009