I have adopted this book as one of the texts for my introductory course on applied math. It's well written and has a diverse set of good examples drawn from everything from computer graphics to sports betting. It's fun to read, and in general, good. It is significantly better than Olver and Shakiban's book of similar title and scope, and a heck of a lot cheaper. In a course like mine where I use several specialized books rather than one of the massive tomes that try (and fail) to cover all of applied math, low price is a factor for me. Negatives include: too few theory problems, a fair number of typos, relegation of the LU factorization to a problem set. On the whole, though, it's not bad.