Partial Differential Equations: An Introduction

I took a course on partial differential equations last semester using this book. At first, I was put off by how small the book was - I did not think it would be enough for me to learn from - but after working with it for a couple of weeks, I realized that it was just the right length. The chapters are very concise, but they have everything they need and a few examples per idea.I found that most of the practice problems in the book are just slightly beyond the examples given, so you do have to work to get the right answers. It wasn't easy, but it definitely added more to my understanding than plug-and-chug questions would have. All in all, I am definitely keeping this book as a reference and would recommend it to others.

Written in a rather terse style. He glosses over many steps in derivations of equations, theorems, etc. This can make learning purely from the text difficult, but with a decent professor to fill in the gaps it's an ideal text. The skipped detail makes coming back to the text later in your career much more productive.

Extremely well written by which I mean the author does not leave out essential information or expect you to know what he is referring to.Plenty of exercises AND a great solution manual. It is ideal for self study. A great rarity in the field of Partial Differential Equations for the reasons mentioned above and worth its weight. There is no book like this for so many other major topics in Math. Very thoughtful author dealing with an extremely difficult topic.

Should be on the shelf of every applied mathematician. Work through the exercises, they are integral to understanding the PDEs

It is a good one and a right choice for me. I also recommend everyone to purchase for this item if you need it.

Like another reviewer said, if you persevere and log the long hours in the earlier chapters of this book, it pays off in dividends in later chapters and exercises. My senior PDEs class covered Chapters 1-7, 9 and 12. This is a tough book but many of the ideas and exercises are interlaced in such a way that a really diligent student will be able to follow. The key here is perseverance against all frustration; for you will be frustrated with this book in the first several chapters and with the exposition. Keep a pencil in hand and work through every step of every proof and example (including all of the intermediate steps that Strauss leaves out) and you will eventually get there.

This text is full of very nice and very practical topics relating to solving PDEs. This information unfortunately is largely inaccessible to most readers as the writing style is just downright BAD. OK - so nobody expects a course in PDEs to be anything but a formidable challenge. As such my complaint against this book is not that it is a difficult read - rather, my complaint is that it is unnecessarily so. There are many parts where arguments take large needless "logical jumps," concepts are explained poorly and examples are often not helpfull at all. For every section of every chapter, I did not see much difference between the writings of this text and what an instructor's lecture notes may look like.The uniqueness - and as much as I hate to admit, what makes the text "good" - is in its treatment of methods for solving PDEs other than separation of variables. Using alternative methods to solve well known equations (i.e. wave, heat etc.) has the advantage of illustrating the differences between the solutions(For example does information "travel" towards infinity or dissipate?). These differences are impossible to teach through separation alone which treats all such equations as if they were the same. There is also the obvious problem of students ending up in a bind when they eventually come across a non-separable problem.All in all, the book illustrates a very nice outline of what a good first course in PDEs should be - but it does just that and nothing else. Its unfriendly presentation of the material makes this work pedagogically unsound.

The book arrived on time as promised. I used expedited shipping as I needed to study over the weekend for a quiz on Monday. Book was new as promised.