First, this book has a few prereq's. Differential equations in calculus and strong linear algebra. He outlines in the appendix a very quick review, but it is meant to illustrate what math you need to have, so it is not a refresher and is simply an inventory.Scheinerman is an author I like. He is good at writing to the audience and in this book it is an into so he has a nice instructive structure in this book.A few observation on his writing style. My view is that Scheinerman is a very energetic instructor in person, and he engages the class with alot of interesting examples and demonstrations. So this book reads like a casual lecture, and it is informal. But his energy does not always translate well to text.The structure of the book is similiar to any intro text, he lays a foundation and then builds. There are sanity checks as he adds more difficult concepts. And he uses the same basic example to contrast new material with what you have learned. And he does a great job of teaching Discrete and Continous systems at the same time.The first half of the book is linear systems, and there is a great examplification: (his term for application + example + amplification ) of markov chains. The other half of the book is non-linear systems, which is actually very extensive coverage from very basic systems of one dimension to complex systems.His examples are engaging and do spark you to think creatively about the applications.CONS:Okay a few cons which bothered me a little. First he mixes technology with this book, since you really are going to use technology to model systems from anything like excel to matlab or mathematica. He even has some "c" source code. The issue I have he mixes the usage of various software for examples. It is nice, but I wish he would have just picked one technology and stuck to it. Not a con for most people. but for me it was.The other is that there are no answers to exercises in this book. There is a solutions book for instructors, but is it even in print?*** The answers are available online.. the link I orginally had for the site was wrongOverall this book helped me, since I really had a limited view of dynamic systems. This book was a great intro and a nice survey of applications.