We employ the homotopy analysis method (HAM) to obtain approximate analytical solutions to the heat-like and wave-like equations. The HAM contains the auxiliary parameter ħ, which provides a convenient way of controlling the convergence region of series solutions. The analysis is accompanied by several linear and nonlinear heat-like and wave-like equations with initial boundary value problems. The results obtained prove that HAM is very effective and simple with less error than the Adomian decomposition method and the variational iteration method.