Recommend a textbook about differential equations

princeton118

Can someone recommend a textbook about differential equations?
I am gonna study it by myself, so I need a good textbook!
Thanks!

Somefantastik

Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems , 8th Edition, by William E. Boyce (Author), Richard C. DiPrima (Author)

I had it for my intermediate DE class. I think it's a really good book that not only covers the absolute basics but covers some useful intermediate stuff. It's well written and there is a solutions manual available, which if you are studying this independently, is by far very useful. I liked it b/c it had a lot of useful examples in it, and some interesting applications.
http://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Dif...2263830&sr=1-2

If you want an extremely introductory book, I used the Edwards and Penney DE book for baby-DE which also has a solutions manual available.
http://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Dif...2264072&sr=1-1

I just thought that the Boyce book was better written and covered more material.

NoMoreExams

What is your goal when doing DEs? If it's just being able to look at a DE and say "oh this fits this category therefore to solve it I need to use ..." then you should REA Problem Solvers - Differential Equations. It does pretty much just that. Each chapter addresses a certain form of a DE in theoretical terms (about 2-3 pages) and how to solve it (by doing 30 pages of problems with detailed solutions). They also have a little chapter about PDEs and other random topics. It's fairly cheap.

smallphi

For absolute beginners I recommend

"An introduction to the theory of differential equations" by Walter Leighton, 1952, 174 pages, it contains short theoretical chapters and lots of examples and exercises with answers on the back.

Then I would continue with

"Differential Equations, linear, nonlinear, ordinary, partial" by A. King, J. Billingham, S. Otto, 2003, 541 pages with lots of examples from real world problems and exercises, no answers. It gives flavor even to more advanced topics like Lie symmetries of DE, phase portraits and chaos theory.

princeton118

Thank you all above.