For All Practical Purposes is the most effective and engaging textbook available for showing mathematics at work in areas with a direct impact on our lives (consumer products and advertising, politics, the economy, the Internet).  It was the first, and remains the best, textbook for liberal arts students and for instructors who want to bring students the excitement of contemporary mathematical thinking and help their students think logically and critically.  The new edition offers a number of changes designed to make the text more accessible than ever to a wider range of students and instructors.

Product Description: Written for beginners, this well organized introduction promotes a solid understanding of differential equations that is flexible enough to meet the needs of many different disciplines. With less emphasis on formal calculation than found in other books all the basic methods are covered—first order equations, separation, exact form, and linear equations—as well as higher order cases, linear equation with constant and variable coefficients, Laplace transform methods, and boundary value problems...read more

Product Description: This well-organized introduction promotes a solid understanding of differential equations with a flexible presentation. The book's systems focus induces an intuitive understanding of the concept of a solution of an initial value problem in order to resolve potential confusion about what is being approximated when a numerical method is used...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)