Book recommendation for first course in ODE

Question

Our college professor is following Lawrence Perko's book for our ODE course, and I have absolutely no clue what he is teaching, as he is randomly doing stuff. I don't like Perko's book because it is not self contained, and does not help in building intuition before doing a particular thing. I want to understand the subject better. Here is our course syllabus for the ODE course:

I want book recommendations that would be relevant, builds things from scratch, and which not just mentions theorems, but also makes it intuitive. P.S. This is my first ODE course.

Does this answer your question? Could you recommend some classic textbooks on ordinary/partial differential equation? — José Carlos Santos, Feb 02 '22 at 11:18
I mean, I specifically mentioned the contents I would need. Also, the other question asks for books based on some particular author's writing style ig ? I just want a readable text. — The Limit Does Not Exist, Feb 02 '22 at 11:30
Traditionally, the list of topics would start with the special tricks for some special classes of solvable scalar DE, from separable to Bernoulli (and Riccati), to introduce the idea of differential equations and their solution. Apart from that, any text book should contain that list of topics, just check the relevant section in your library for one that meets your personal taste. — Lutz Lehmann, Feb 02 '22 at 11:41

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 02 '22 at 12:27

I used 2 books to self-study:

Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems by Boyce, DiPrima and Meade
Schaum's Outline of Differential Equations by Bronson and Costa

Both books are very expository so it was easy to understand what they were saying without constantly cross-referencing topics.

Hope that helps.

Book recommendation for first course in ODE

1 Answers1