Product Description

"Algebra" 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 accomodate a wide variety of instructors and course contents. The guiding philosophical principle throughout the text is that the material should be presented in the maximum usable generality consistent with good pedagogy. Therefore it is essentially self-contained, stresses clarity rather than brevity and contains an unusually large number of illustrative exercises. The book covers major areas of modern algebra, which is a necessity for most mathematics students in sufficient breadth and depth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3133225 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 502 pages

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.