A friend of mine recently explained to me a little bit about using Lie groups and symmetries to obtain solutions of PDEs. I was interested and wanted to learn a bit more about it. He's been using Olver's "Applications of Lie Groups to Differential Equations" but I found it a bit out of my reach.
I've taken a PDE course that followed Fritz John's "Partial Differential Equations" pretty closely, and a basic differential geometry course (curves and surfaces). I also have limited knowledge of group theory, but he said he didn't have any when he started learning the theory.
So my question is: should I study PDEs or group theory a bit more before attempting to tackle Olver's book, or should I try an easier text first?
Thanks for the help.