Customer Reviews

Introduction to Partial Differential Equations with MATLAB

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Cooper's book does some things quite well. While most courses on PDE's are reduced to repetitive applications of separation of variables and Fourier series, Cooper offers a new approach. He goes by equation rather than by technique, and introduces nonlinear equations and numerical methods very early. Separation of variables and Fourier series do not come up until Chapter 4. The first chapter, which reviews elements of analysis, is a very good reference. MATLAB is well incorporated throughout the text.

The reason I do not rate this book more highly is that the writing is unbelievably sloppy. There are at least five typos per chapter, usually more. Crucial things, like Green's first identity, are misprinted. There are dozens of typos in the answers in the back, which makes it very hard to check your work.

Judging just by the content, this is a very good book. However, the misprints in the math (to say nothing of those in the text) are so severe that I would not recommend buying it until a better-proofread edition comes out.

This is a fairly challenging text. It's currently being used in my undergrad PDE course, and the flow of material is a bit out of the ordinary. The book starts off with the method of characteristics and weak solutions, which are slightly more sophisticated and unusual topics than some of the later material, making it difficult to get started. The focus on using Matlab is nice, and most things are fairly well-explained. Typographical errors are rampant, however, making it very poor for self-study (you need someone to point out the errors to you).

All in all, not bad -- the second edition will hopefully be much better, and if you have a decent grounding in multivariate calc and ODE's, you'll be OK.

This book does some things very well and some things not so well, depending on your perspective. Perhaps one of its problems is that it attempts to straddle the line between being a book for scientists and being a book for math students.

That said, it could stand a fairly hefty reorganization. For example, the relationship between Green's functions, weak solutions, and fundamental solutions could be brought together in an early chapter instead of spread throughout the book. Same goes for material on eigenfunction expansion.
The material on a given PDE for one dimension should probably be at least near the chapter on the same PDE in multiple dimensions, rather than being separated by 6-7 chapters.

On top of this, the material is sometimes hard to follow in terms of motivation and justification. This is not uniform, however, and some parts of the book are quite clear. And, all things considered, it does a fairly good job of presenting things rigorously without alienating its potential audience of scientists and engineers who are not as versed in proof-based books.

Aesthetically, there are a lot of somewhat serious typos and the typography is atrocious. For example, parentheses are not sized properly, bars written over letters do not cover the letters as they should. These are basic and easy to fix LaTeX errors, and it gives the book an appearance of having been rushed or at least not given the attention to detail it should have been.

Although I received this item before Feb. 24th as claimed, it took too long time!! About 3 weeks. Was it shipped from China??