When I started using this textbook for a graduate level engineering mathematics I thought I would "see the light" and had finally come across an author that would help me understand advanced mathematics and its application to real-world problems. Needless to say I was let down. Kreysig offers no explanation for many new and complex concepts and often leaves out helpful background (theory/proofs) necessary to have a full undestanding and skill level necessary to apply the concepts. A case in point is his handling of the Legendre Transforms/Polynomials and Sturm-Liouville Theory. Did I mention that I think it is a bad idea to cover matrices and linear algebra in differnt chapters of the book When I took ODE/PDE in undergraduate we used the text, Advanced Engineering mathematics by Oneil and at the time I thought this book was difficult and confusing. Althought it was not filled with color figures and graphs it contained many proofs and theorems to explain the concepts. Im starting to use this book as a reference for those concepts that arent covered thoroughly enough by Kreysig and now appreciate the ONeil book more and more everyday.
Ive had for some time the 6th Ed. of this text, and I never liked it, due in part to the tiny print. Recently in a graduate engineering course I had to repair a deficiency I was unaware that I had in working with differential equations. I found this text enormously helpful. The authors examples were right "on the money." The manner in which he had everything well organized for reference was also helpful. One of the critiques I saw here seemed to fault the book for inadequate examples (i.e., "solutions"). I notice that the publisher now has a "Student Solutions Manual for Advanced Engineering Mathematics" which at least one reader claims is very good. If it is good, it is a credit to the author for trying to go a step further to answer this kind of need. In principle, I think readers are correct who criticize texts that are unhelpful in this way -- which, for example, have numerous, difficult problems for the reader to work on, and by comparison have a negligible number of explanatory examples for the reader to learn from in order to be able to solve the problems. The text winds up representing to the reader knowledge that he never acquired nor ever could acquire using the text itself, when it should be the other way around. However, I feel from personal experience that this text deserves to have much more good said about it than bad in this area.
Kreyszig obviously knows what he is talking about, but lacks showing it. It is hard to beleive that Mathematics book so thick has examples that miss complex steps, simply because these steps are deemed elementry by Kreyszigs mathematic standards. The examples are workable, but they only take a few hours of analysing and calculating the multiple lines of mathematics he Kreyszig didnt feel like entering
