Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems: WITH ODE Architect CD-ROM by William E. Boyce (2005-07-25)

Delivered in time. A good book for Engineering students.

Came quickly, was unbelievably cheap, and was in great condition. Had to clean the outside a bit and remove stickers, but the inside was pristine.

Great book. Just not as through in explanation ad you may need.

First off I've taken DE twice. The first time I was not satisfied with my grade. I could blame the teacher or the book but that's just sugar coating the issue.Anyway the first time around I had this book. I absolutely didn't get it and none of it made sense to me. Needless to say, I hated this book.The second time around (at a different school) we used a different book. 'A First Course In Differential Equations' By Dennis G. Zill. After reading through the first two sections of that book I immediately went back to this book. Even some of my classmates from that class ended up using the Boyce book because the Zill book was about as clear as mud.Since this book is much better than its competition I gave it a high score.

I only used the book for practice problems because the professor I had was great with explaining his lectures and I took good notes. But from a practice standpoint it is an excellent book with plenty of workable examples.

Like everyone else is saying, this book sucks. The only good parts I see are how *some* sections are kinda clear, and also the pretty organized layout. There are some decent examples, but that's really not saying much. This book overall is very confusing and poorly worded. If you don't believe me, then just read the other reviewers. The book spends approximately 3 pages rambling on about slope fields, and that should've only taken 1/2 a page at most. The authors of this book come up with the most convoluted explanations ever!More importantly, the book often skips steps when doing examples. It's very likely the authors just slapped together most of the examples through a computer, as they often contain HUGE leaps of logic, and skip many crucial steps. In addition, some problems in the book are just awful, and by awful, I mean ridiculously stupid. Some problems will probably take forever to be done by a human, as they involve ridiculously time-consuming integrals, which is completely irrelevent to the study of differential equations. Other stupid problems include how the author expects students to possess a complete understanding of chemistry / physics to solve the problem - An example could be a differential equation involving battery charge. The authors expected me to know how to rewrite the equation if they rewire the resistors and then tinker the voltage - the same goes for a chemical reaction problem - they just expected me to know physical chemistry and write a diff eqn to model it. Lastly, some answers in the back are wrong, which is pitiful considering that the greedy publisher releases this book at least once every 2 years or so.The book is poorly worded, does a bad job explaining, lacks coherent examples, contains errors (STILL!), and contains very annoying problems that are way beyond the explanations / examples

When I first received this textbook, I thought that it was going to be terrible based on the past reviews and the examples throughout the book. However, as I went through this book with my class I started to notice a few things not clearly seen from a first inspection. While it is true that the authors seems to ramble on aimlessly about solutions to the problems they face within each section of a given chapter, they do actually give a definite solution in the form of a theorem. Most students, such as I, will probably not understand at least half of what the authors are trying to get at in each section. But the theorems the authors write are a different story. My recommendation if your just trying to pass your differential equations class is just to read the theorems listed in each section. The examples in each section seem to be a learning example trying to teach you the basic concepts. However without a teacher to back you up, these examples will just incite more questions from the students that would be unanswered since a textbook can not respond to a student's immediate questions. If the student has time, they should read the wall of text in the book to truly understand what the authors are trying to poke at. This book requires full knowledge of solving derivatives and integrals as the authors assume the students will know how to solve them, hence there will be no solutions of them in the examples. It does however give a review over a few topics that will be required to know in order to proceed through with certain sections such as power series and matrices. Obviously this book is not the best, but given a chance it still does a fine job of teaching a student the complicated nature of differential equations.

The book shipped in less than a week, and it was of good quality.