On the other hand, the authors were careful not to go overboard and introduce one symbolic technique after another. I do not feel in the least that my students were shortchanged on symbolic manipulations required to be successful in later courses. I liked the balance between graphical analysis and the traditional symbolic analysis required in your typical DE course. It was made evident in the first section of the text that graphical analysis would be used as a significant problem solving tool and the value of qualitative analysis was repeatedly stressed throughout the remainder of the text.
I liked the continuous emphasis on qualitative analysis. In fact, when we hit the 'lucky guess' methods in later sections, my students found these traditional methods of solving DE's to be a snap compared to the algebra they used when solving systems. I thoroughly enjoyed the systems approach to solving DE's and my students did, too. 'I really liked the way that systems are introduced at the beginning of the text and stressed throughout the remainder of the text.
