Many people who already know linear algebra agree with the title, but you are the first person I’ve heard of to actually learn linear algebra from this book. That is a much more useful recommendation. But I do wonder if some level of mathematical sophistication is a prerequisite for this book, a prerequisite not fulfilled by most linear algebra students.
Many people who already know linear algebra agree with the title, but you are the first person I’ve heard of to actually learn linear algebra from this book
Hi! I’m another member of that class.
But I do wonder if some level of mathematical sophistication is a prerequisite for this book, a prerequisite not fulfilled by most linear algebra students
Indeed. On the other hand, “most linear algebra students” != “readers of LW interested in studying linear algebra”.
(Speaking as someone who was definitely in its target audience, the book actually felt very hand-holdy, almost patronizing at times, with its “Some mathematicians use the term X instead of Y” sidebars and the like. Nonetheless, I’ve always said that it was worth it to have gone to my undergraduate institution just to have learnt linear algebra from this book.)
If you had this for a class, could you report on the rest of the students? What kind of class was it; in particular, how mature were the students? Did it generally work?
It was a 200-level introductory linear algebra course targeted at math majors, at an ordinary state university. Whether it “worked” depends on what you consider the purpose of such a course to be. It was good for the best students, and for the rest, it wouldn’t have mattered what book had been used, because they wouldn’t have read it anyway.
(I did hear some complaints, but I also heard similar complaints about virtually every book in every class I ever took in my life, so this fact doesn’t seem to say much about Axler in particular, other than that it doesn’t prevent such complaints.)
I should say, as I did here, that Axler alone isn’t enough. One needs to do more computational practice than it provides. But that’s not hard to do, if you know you need to do it.
Many people who already know linear algebra agree with the title, but you are the first person I’ve heard of to actually learn linear algebra from this book. That is a much more useful recommendation. But I do wonder if some level of mathematical sophistication is a prerequisite for this book, a prerequisite not fulfilled by most linear algebra students.
Hi! I’m another member of that class.
Indeed. On the other hand, “most linear algebra students” != “readers of LW interested in studying linear algebra”.
(Speaking as someone who was definitely in its target audience, the book actually felt very hand-holdy, almost patronizing at times, with its “Some mathematicians use the term X instead of Y” sidebars and the like. Nonetheless, I’ve always said that it was worth it to have gone to my undergraduate institution just to have learnt linear algebra from this book.)
If you had this for a class, could you report on the rest of the students?
What kind of class was it; in particular, how mature were the students? Did it generally work?
It was a 200-level introductory linear algebra course targeted at math majors, at an ordinary state university. Whether it “worked” depends on what you consider the purpose of such a course to be. It was good for the best students, and for the rest, it wouldn’t have mattered what book had been used, because they wouldn’t have read it anyway.
(I did hear some complaints, but I also heard similar complaints about virtually every book in every class I ever took in my life, so this fact doesn’t seem to say much about Axler in particular, other than that it doesn’t prevent such complaints.)
I should say, as I did here, that Axler alone isn’t enough. One needs to do more computational practice than it provides. But that’s not hard to do, if you know you need to do it.