A First Course in Differential Equations

Shipped quickly and was as described.

This was my Diff EQ book for my engineering program. Honestly I still don't know how I passed the course, but I can tell you it's not because of this book. I gave it 2 stars because it has a decent solution manual. I probably shouldn't say this, but you can find this book easily online as a pdf for free. Spending money on this is insane. Don't be like me.

Unfortunately my Differential Equations teacher has a PHD in Obfuscation and should be nowhere near the classroom. Especially this course. No one in the course can figure out what he is doing or talking about, and when I do catch a small snippet it's as if you he talking to someone that had this class 10 classes ago and already understands everything, but just needs a slight reminder as to what the course is about.Thus the need to have a decent text book. Which this book completely fails to be, in fact it almost feels like it's written by this professor, it very seldom explains things, and leaves out steps when showing examples so you can't even figure out what they did. It's better than the lectures, but that's like compering being shot by a gun to being blown up by a bomb, sure the bomb is worse, but neither is desirable at all.

The books has many good things. I was very disappointed because I payed for a new book and a received an use book.I had few water stains.Be careful no to be deceived.

I have been working with this book for about a half of a semester so far. If you don't catch what the teacher said, this book isn't too much help. It would be much improved if the author simply took time to fully work through the problems that were presented. Generally, the book will present a problem, show the first couple of steps, skip two or three steps, then show a step and finally skip to the answer. If you are learning this for the first time as I am, this leads to a lot of head scratching and searching for how to do things elsewhere.Update....It is now very close to the end of the semester. I can't tell you how much frustration this book has caused me. This course probably would have been improved if we had no book at all. There have been so many times where I have wasted a lot of time trying to follow one of the examples in the book but became completely stuck because so many steps had been skipped that I had no idea how he got from one step to the 'next'. In the end, nothing turned out to be terribly difficult once I had given Google a try. I am doing well in the course due to persistence on my part but definitely not because of this book. In short, this book failed to do its primary job of passing knowledge on to its readers. Buy a different book.