The book Partial Differential Equations through Examples and Exercises
has evolved from the lectures and exercises that the authors have given
for more than fifteen years, mostly for mathematics, computer science,
physics and chemistry students. By our best knowledge, the book is a
first attempt to present the rather complex subject of partial
differential equations (PDEs for short) through active
reader-participation. Thus this book is a combination of theory and
examples. In the theory of PDEs, on one hand, one has an interplay of
several mathematical disciplines, including the theories of analytical
functions, harmonic analysis, ODEs, topology and last, but not least,
functional analysis, while on the other hand there are various methods,
tools and approaches. In view of that, the exposition of new notions and
methods in our book is "step by step". A minimal amount of expository
theory is included at the beginning of each section Preliminaries with
maximum emphasis placed on well selected examples and exercises
capturing the essence of the material. Actually, we have divided the
problems into two classes termed Examples and Exercises (often
containing proofs of the statements from Preliminaries). The examples
contain complete solutions, and also serve as a model for solving
similar problems, given in the exercises. The readers are left to find
the solution in the exercises; the answers, and occasionally, some
hints, are still given. The book is implicitly divided in two parts,
classical and abstract.