Reader's review:
This book helped me get a High Pass in Applied Mathematics here at the Thayer School of Engineering of Dartmouth College. It's not a great intro text to this material and it skips alot of details but it's a fantastic additional reference book.
For example there is a solved problem of a wave function PDE, which involves Bessel functions. Earlier sections of the text refer to how the ODE's are solved by Bessel, which many books leave out.
Later sections of the text contain an intriguing treatment of the Laplace transform.
This book is not for beginners but is a good stepping stone to more advanced concepts such as the Calculus of Variations. Beyond this you are wise to consider additional texts such as Hildebrand's Methods of Applied Mathematics which contains a more rigorous section on C of V, Bender and Orszag's Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers, Wunsch's Complex Variables, and even a good review on PDE's such as Haberman's Elementary Applied PDE's is not a bad idea if you are in a review situation like I was (having spent 8 yrs in Dot Com's and then back to grad school in engineering).
