Complex Variables and Applications (8th edition)

Good

I had no problems with shipping or receiving the book on time. I bought the international version of the textbook, printed in all black-and-white except for the cover. Irrelevant, but you can actually slightly feel the text if you rub a finger over a page. The pages themselves are glossy and easy to flip, even when your fingers are near frictionless. As for the material itself, for one, the way they present homework problems is a bit odd. There will be a set of exercises after every few sections, rather than all at the end of a chapter; each of these sets restarts the problem numbering at 1, so you really have to count by both page number and problem number. every so often, there will be a mini-section that gives examples on material in the previous section, which is usually very useful. The section numbering does seem a bit odd a times, though. There will be a section to introduce some important theorem, and then the next section a proof to the theorem, etc. With practice, the material is ultimately pretty understandable, even to a non-math major like myself. Most of the homework problems come with the answer, so you can make sure you did the problem right. My class never got to the section on real-life applications of complex variables in engineering or physics, sadly, or else I'd be able to comment on it. Overall though, I think it's a pretty good textbook.