The students taking the course are exposed to some of the basic tools that are used in stability analysis of dynamical systems. The objective of the course therefore is to make the students familiar with such tools for two reasons: The first obvious reason is that via such tools they will be able to do stability analysis in certain simple, generic cases. The second reason is, whenever the system they are working on does not fit into the description which is necessary for the tools to be usable, they can, based on their basic training they recieve in this course, move on to learning (by themselves) more sophisticated methods for advanced stability analysis.