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The book covers an extensive range of topics in its twenty chapters and there are many examples of real-world problems.
What makes this book stand out from the rest are the MAPLE commands and the associated web-site. I was able reproduce almost every figure in the book and then went on to investigate my own systems. Dr Lynch is to be congratulated on making such an advanced topic so simple and interesting.
If you have MAPLE or are interested in nonlinear systems then you should buy this book.
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.
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.
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.
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