Friday, 9 December 2011

books - Text for an introductory Real Analysis course.

I'm not a fan of the Pfaffenberger text. For example, look at the proof of the chain rule. The proof sticks to the "derivative as slope" idea, and so has to consider the special case where one derivative is zero. This isn't very elegant, and causes confusion in what should be a straightforward proof -- IMO when students are first being exposed to something as elementary as analysis, simplicity should be an overriding concern.



Apostol, Buck and Bartle, those are texts that I like pretty well. Or the lecture notes used at the University of Alberta for their honours calculus sequence Math 117, 118, 217, 317 (available on-line) -- pretty well based on Apostol.



There's a few subtle issues going on here. Some departments view analysis as something people learn after they go through a service-level calculus sequence. Some departments treat calculus as part of an analysis sequence -- ie students only see calculus through the eyes of analysis. What book you choose is largely determined by what path your department is comfortable with.

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