Notes on Diffy Qs: Differential Equations for Engineers

Reviewed by Alim Sukhtayev, Assistant Professor, Miami University on 8/2/18

Comprehensiveness rating: 4

The book covers all the material one might want in an introductory Differential Equations course aimed at engineering students. The book provides plenty of examples and well-constructed exercise sets. Overall, the textbook is well-organized and written in the form of lecture notes. Even though the table of contents is well-structured, I would still have the existence and uniqueness section as a separate section of the first chapter and I would also mention Peano's existence theorem in that section.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The book is well written and edited. I found the presentation of the material to be objective and clear.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The text is up to date.

Clarity rating: 5

The text of this book is clear and easy to understand.

Consistency rating: 5

The notation seems consistent.

Modularity rating: 5

The textbook is divided into chapters, sections, and subsections with plenty of excises at the end of each section.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The text is organized in a clear fashion. My personal preference would be to have the existence and uniqueness section as a separate section of the first chapter.

Interface rating: 5

As for a pdf book, navigation is fairly easy.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I found the text to be clear and I did not notice any grammatical errors throughout the book.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The text covers the standard differential equations topics aimed at engineering students. The book does not have any cultural issues.

This is a good book for the intended course. It has a few nice features. In particular, it is concise and written in the form of lecture notes with a lot of exercises of different levels at the end of each section.