>>9264414The most comprehensive for basic elementary math would be "What is Mathematics" by Courant. Get the 'revised' Stuart second edition, all he did was add a prologue and an extra last chapter everything else is untouched.
Axler is good because his precalc book comes with "Student Solutions Guide" so you have every second exercise completely worked out to see what he's done.
However I advise you to do neither. What I would do is find the math book you actually want to do, in my case it was a George Thomas calculus text. Anytime I ran into something I didn't understand, I simply went into Axler's book and looked it up or Khan Academy. By the end of Thomas' book I had a solid understanding of written proofs, and a lot of analytical geometry which I knew nothing of before starting the book.
Other books to just take by the seat of your pants are Knuth's Concrete Math, which is totally doable even for highschool level math ability. Spivak's Calculus is another book like that, made for self-studying and challenging enough that if you slog through it you'll make up for whatever you missed in high school.
I did go back and do "What is Mathematics?" anyway but that was just because I found it such a good book and had some free time on holiday, so I read that.
