Customer Reviews

Elementary Real Analysis: Second Edition (2008)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is really good. It provides a gentle introduction into real analysis and explains concepts quite well. It tells you which sections can be omitted if you don't wish to go through the entire book, and the sections are written in such a way that you'll still be able to understand the subsequent sections if you do indeed choose to skip the optional sections. It does give some answers/hints in the back of the book, but I wish they provided an additional solutions manual. (Perhaps they do, and I just didn't search hard enough). Either way, it's a really well-written book, and I highly recommend it.

You will probably need some previous exposure to analysis to really appreciate this one but if you do not have such - you will have to take it on faith that this book is the ultimate real analysis reference to introduce you to the subject and help you master it in ways suitable to any further study that would need mathematical analysis.. Seriously.

I used this text to teach myself real analysis and I had some difficulty with it. I appreciated that there were many paths to choose from in the text and there were sections I could read over for enrichment and just try a few problems from.

My biggest gripe is probably the notes at the end of the chapter. I found it very annoying that in some of the problems there had "See note ##" appended. If it needs to be included then it should be written in the problem. Sometimes it was appended to a problem that the reader (and maybe this was a personal limitation) had no hope of solving on their own and the answer was given without explanation. Some of these problems were deriving famous formulas such as Binet's formula for the Fibonacci sequence.

The first chapter has a quote by Euler speaking of students attempting analysis with a lack of algebra and occasionally the author will take leaps in algebra or logic that take some filling in and it takes time to get used to the bounding about but perhaps that's par for the course.

A solutions manual would be nice but I doubt that's going to happen.

The modern approach of real analysis in this book makes it most valuable for those who intend to go farther in real analysis (e.g. with the same authors' "Real Analysis").
In addition to that an hypertexted version is available at very low cost.
A "must" in every personal math library.