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.
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.