Customer Reviews

Linear Algebra (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics)

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I found the book to be very thorough and well written. It seemed very easy to understand except for the chapter on Jordan Canonical Forms. However, I would not recommend this book to someone who is learning it for the first time, unless they have a high degree of mathematical maturity. Try the beginner book by Howard Anton.

This book is very confusing. The reader is required to make very large leaps to relate example to exercise. Most of these leaps (chap 2-6) involve wading through set theory instead of applying what was covered in a given chapter. It seems as if the questions are designed so the reader must figure out some "trick" in order to solve the problem. This book may be useful if the reader is very familiar with logic notation, set theory, and linear algebra; otherwise, you will probably spend a lot of time learning these things from other sources.

This book is god-awful. The author will use the same symbol to mean many different things, and won't bother to explain the new terminology if he's used it within the past couple of pages.

It's impossible to open the book and pick the important bits out of each chapter - theorems, proofs, and examples all look the same. If you want to find that theorem you think you saw several pages ago, you have to skim very carefully.

The exercises at the end of each chapter are all complete wastes of time. Invert a 5x5 matrix! You won't learn anything useful in the process, but it'll take you a while to get there!

If you want to learn linear algebra, just read mathworld and wikipedia instead of buying this book.