Basically, this is a great book. I couldn't put down, really. It's sort of a 'everything you always wanted to know about modeling' book, and the author went to great lenghts to compress a huge amount of material in one handsome, managable volume without becoming superficial or less rigorous.
The only thing I'm not happy with is the author's own description of prerequisites: he claims the book is self-contained, and only requires "some calculus and linear algebra". In reality, readers had better be comfortable with complex numbers, operators, coordinate systems, probability theory and various other topics of mathematical physics. And instead of "some" calculus, there is serious calculus involved here. Laplace transforms, the 'del' operator and various other more-or-less advanced topics are presented in the first chapter in a way that suggests the reader's familiarity with them. To those of us that are familiar with these concepts, the book is a delight. To those of us that are not, the book is likely to be too fast-paced and advanced.