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Rating: 
Summary: The MAPLE programs and web pages make this book unique.
Review: A great book. Great web pages and short, easy to copy and edit
Maple programs. Lots of material not covered in other books on this topic. Maple is my favorite package. The others are not
as user friendly. I felt I must write again since amazon have been showing excerpts from book. What a geat idea. Chapters in this book that interested me were fractals, multifractals and
optics. Authors web-site is given on back cover of book. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: One of the best!
Review: Good points:
1. Solutions to ALL exercises - why don't all books do this - I hate answers to odd numbered exercises - aaaagh!2. Maple programs can be viewed on the Web - they all work. 3. Covers some topics not in other books. 4. You don't need to be a math major to understand the book. 5. There are no bad points. I would rate this book as highly as Steven Strogatz's "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos" (now in paperback) and the book "Chaos - an Introduction to Dynamical Systems" by James Yorke et al.
Rating:
Summary: very nice introduction to dynamical systems
Review: I did my degree in Micro-Electronics and Computing but I've always been fascinated with chaos theory. This book is easy to read and you do not need to be a pure mathematician to understand the theory involved. I did most of the lower level mathematics in my degree course and it was nice to see it applied to real world problems. The MAPLE code for many of the plots in the book is included at the end of chapters and there is an excellent web-site that allows you to view the figures in color. The MAPLE tutorials given at the beginning of the book should help new users. The Aims and Objectives listed at the beginning of each chapter is a nice touch and there are many interesting exercises for the reader to get their teeth into. Some of the chapters are at an advanced level but the results given there are easy to understand. It was also nice to have recently pubished research articles in the Bibliography. I would highly recommend this book to anybody interested in chaos, fractals or nonlinear maths in general. I wish a topic like this could have been offered in my degree. Mark Siever BSc (Hons) Micro-Electronics and Computing.
Rating:
Summary: First-rate!
Review: I did my degree in Micro-Electronics and Computing but I've always been fascinated with chaos theory. This book is easy to read and you do not need to be a pure mathematician to understand the theory involved. I did most of the lower level mathematics in my degree course and it was nice to see it applied to real world problems. The MAPLE code for many of the plots in the book is included at the end of chapters and there is an excellent web-site that allows you to view the figures in color. The MAPLE tutorials given at the beginning of the book should help new users. The Aims and Objectives listed at the beginning of each chapter is a nice touch and there are many interesting exercises for the reader to get their teeth into. Some of the chapters are at an advanced level but the results given there are easy to understand. It was also nice to have recently pubished research articles in the Bibliography. I would highly recommend this book to anybody interested in chaos, fractals or nonlinear maths in general. I wish a topic like this could have been offered in my degree. Mark Siever BSc (Hons) Micro-Electronics and Computing.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book!
Review: It is an excellent book for non mathematicians. It is well written and clear, although some knowledge of linear algebra and ordinary differential equations are prerequisites. This book takes the reader from the basic theory through to recently published research material. Additionally, Professor Lynch teaches how to do things with the aid of the Maple algebraic manipulation package. Besides, it includes exercises and their solutions. As far as I know, it is the first book to deal with dynamical systems that has an intelligible approach for non mathematicians. Undoubtedly, it is a valuable book for students and scientists who work with dynamical systems in various branches of knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: very nice introduction to dynamical systems
Review: This book is a very nice introduction to the theory of dynamical
systems. It covers all aspects and even more than usually thaught
in a class on dynamical systems. Especially, I like to see
many examples for various applications. These examples and the
Maple programs make it well suitable for students to learn
on dynamical systems by themself.
Rating: 
Summary: Not ready for print
Review: This book is rife with errors, omissions, grammatical and programming mistakes, hand-waving and is generally misleading about theorems. Only if you know very little about linear algebra and diff eq. will you not notice this -- this book only skims the surface of topics (breaking down easy cases in R^2 so poorly that when the same topic comes up in R^3 it's "a whole new thing") and theorem statements are often confusing compared to better sources at best. In all fairness, the book is very ambitous, but there is not enough content in the book to tackle actual problems not couched in its own terms. Many of the graphs and examples are nice, but they do not make up for the lack of editing, organization, and rigor (of even the usual "applied math" variety -- no one is expecting pure math here) in this book. The first two chapters are deceptively nice -- things begin to drop off quickly. Update: The ever dropping price of a new edition does not lie -- if you can, pick up Perko instead.
Rating:
Summary: Not ready for print
Review: This book is rife with errors, omissions, grammatical and programming mistakes, hand-waving and is generally misleading about theorems. Only if you know very little about linear algebra and diff eq. will you not notice this -- this book only skims the surface of topics (breaking down easy cases in R^2 so poorly that when the same topic comes up in R^3 it's "a whole new thing") and theorem statements are often confusing compared to better sources at best. In all fairness, the book is very ambitous, but there is not enough content in the book to tackle actual problems not couched in its own terms. Many of the graphs and examples are nice, but they do not make up for the lack of editing, organization, and rigor (of even the usual "applied math" variety -- no one is expecting pure math here) in this book. The first two chapters are deceptively nice -- things begin to drop off quickly. Update: The ever dropping price of a new edition does not lie -- if you can, pick up Perko instead.
Rating:
Summary: This is great book
Review: This is only book I find with program files that work right away. Graphics in Maple is excelent for chaotic system and algebra very powerful. I like to rotate figures in 3D and use animation. I learn more about optics, it nice to see complex numbers used in applications. Lots of other applications also. Book is best for students who want to get programs working quickly. There is a website with working programs. You should also look at Maple Application website for many many examples. I recomend book to everyone.
Rating:
Summary: More information
Review: Thought I'd give a more in depth review than the others here. Most advanced math textbooks contain one or two chapters that turn me off. I must say that every chapter in this book had useful information or very good applications. The opening chapter is a brief introduction to Maple V (some Maple 8 commands are posted on the books website). Note that Maple 9 is now out and no doubt Maple X will soon follow. Chapters 1-7 cover planar systems in some detail, vectorfield in DEplot is a real winner here. Chapters 8 and 9 cover 3D and nonautonomous systems - the poincare command in Maple is a real time saver. Chapters 10-12 cover a lot of research results on limit cycles - the most lucid I have seen in any textbook. The remaining half of the book concentrates on both real and complex discrete systems. There are the usual cobweb diagrams, bifurcation diagrams and Mandelbrot set. Where this book comes into its own, however, is in Chapters 16-20. Lasers and nonlinear optics are investigated using complex iterative maps. Fractals and even multifractals are discussed in some detail. The book ends with a chapter dedicated to chaos control. Overall, the book is concise with pertinent examples and applications. It is not dogged down with math notation, theorems and proofs. Strogatz, Perko and Allgood are good books to practice more Maple programing techniques.
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