Dynamics of Complex Systems (Studies in Nonlinearity)

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Summary: What happened with recent complexity?
Review: This book is a big disappointment. In a 800- hundred pages volume one would expect to find the main ideas of the hot area of complexity. Most of the recent results obtained over the last 10 years are not there. Not a single word on criticality and scaling, modelling of random networks, the implications of critical phenomena to complexity, or the recent approaches to evolutionary dynamics. Even those problems already presented in other monographs (as pattern formation in biology) do not receive an adequate attention to those interested in complexity issues. Save your money.

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Summary: A Collage of Previous Work?
Review: This is a simplistic, out of date treatment of a diverse and rapidly changing field. It is a disappoint that Bar Yam failed to capture the depth of the field, instead offering a cursory look at, mostly, classical examples in which Bar Yam did not take part. I would prefer, instead, to see a leader in the field write such a text, such that I could be assured that details that were omitted were less relevant, not simply forgotten.

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Summary: An excellent overview of the study of complex systems
Review: This text provides an excellent introduction to the numerous and diverse techniques used in the study of complex systems. The field of complex systems emerged from a union of ideas from many seemingly disparate areas of research. Where many texts on complex systems speak to this union of ideas, Bar-Yam's text focuses on both the ideas and their implementation in the form of techniques and methods used in the study of these systems. These methodologies originate from many fields of research and several texts could be written about any single one; however I feel that the author has done an excellent job in choosing an important set of problems to present and the detail in which they are presented. This book is appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. I highly recommended it to my students in my course on complex systems, and if your interests coincide with the topics covered in this book, I highly recommend it to you.