Product Description

fulfills a definite need to provide a self-contained, one volume, graduate level algebra text that is readable by the average graduate student and flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of instructors and course contents. It contains an unusually large number of illustrative exercises.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #651250 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Synopsis
fulfills a definite need to provide a self-contained, one volume, graduate level algebra text that is readable by the average graduate student and flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of instructors and course contents. It contains an unusually large number of illustrative exercises.

Customer Reviews

Excellent and Challenging
Hungerford's text is a wonderful book to learn algebra from. In my opinion, it covers significantly more than other first-year postgraduate algebra texts, and usually in a more general fashion. His proofs are very usually very complete (unless he has left some of it for an exercise), and when they are not complete he warns the reader of this fact. Another plus (at least to me) is that many of the examples are generally reserved for exercises, which makes a student work them through, yielding a firmer understanding. The actual material is mostly standard (group theory, characterisation of finitely generated abelian groups, rings, modules, fields, Galois theory, some commutative algebra), but Hungerford tends to take a more categorical approach than most, usually defining constructions (such as free groups and tensor products) both directly and by their universal properties. Since universal properties appear all over mathematics (and especially algebra), this is good experience. The reader should be warned though--Hungerford's book does take some work. But in the end, I think it is all worth it.