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On Fri, 7 May 2004 [log in to unmask] wrote: > Hello, > > It's that time of year when members of my department start having heated > discussions about textbook choices for next year. Although there are many > nice linear algebra texts available it seems that we will be choosing between > David Lay's "Linear Algebra with Applications" and Anton's "Elementary > Linear Algebra" (not his more recent "Contemporary Linear Algebra"). > Does anyone have any opinions on the pros and cons of these texts. Both > are popular and have been around for a while but they take quite different > approaches to the material. > > Thanks > D Sevee > I enjoyed teaching out of Lay this semester. The applications were well developed, there was a spiral approach to the "hard" ideas of linear independence, basis and span, and the geometric part of the subject was not neglected. The exercises were a good mix of the computational and conceptual--many of the later were easy which is good. I found myself still going to other sources for some material. At the end of the course, I wanted to talk about vector spaces over finite fields--David Poole's book had some nice motivating material on ISBN numbers and coding theory; Poole's book also had an exploration on magic squares which the students enjoyed. I'd like to hear about other people's favorites as well. best, Terry Gaffney