AIM Open Textbook Initiative

Approved Textbooks
Open source math textbooks
for undergraduate courses

Evaluation criteria
What the Editorial Board looks for
in evaluating books

Editorial Board
Brief profiles of the
board members

The following book has met the evaluation criteria developed by the AIM Editorial Board.

Notes on Diffy Qs
Jiří Lebl

Digital versions pdf

Source available Yes

Exercises Yes

Answers Yes

Solution Manual No

License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

291 page text for one semester of differential equations
488 exercises with answers to 148 of them
Class tested with list of course adoptions available
Errata list for current version
Printed copy available from Lulu for $15.90
For more information and to download

The book is subtitled "Differential Equations for Engineers" and is suitable for the typical one term course for science and engineering students that follows calculus. The book lends itself to a variety of course designs. Beyond the first two chapters there is not a strict linear dependency for the remaining chapters. The table of contents:

First order ODEs
Higher order linear ODEs
Systems of ODEs
Fourier series and PDEs
Eigenvalue problems
The Laplace transform
Power series methods

The book stands on its own but can also be used with IODE, a free software package developed at the University of Illinois for experimenting with differential equations.

From the author's statement on the book's home page:

The book can be updated and modified even if I happen to drop off the face of the earth. You do not have to depend on any publisher being interested as with traditional textbooks. Furthermore, errata are fixed promptly, meaning simply that if you teach the same class next term, all errata that are spotted are already fixed. No need to wait several years for a new edition.