<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent rough draft of a textbook.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but the 2nd edition will hopefully be better
Review: 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.
<< 1 >>
| 
