>>11792058>>11792063Lang was a diehard Bourbakist. All his stuff is written exactly the same way.
His algebra book has been, and still is, extremely commonly used in the first year of grad school for decades for a few reasons. When it first released in the 60s, there was just literally nothing comparable to it in coverage. You had to use it. Plus in pre-Internet days it was the best reference text bar none.
Nowadays there are many competing multi-purpose fatass algebra bibles (e.g. Aluffi, Rotman, Dummit/Foote) but as far as I know, all of the alternatives suffer from having kind of blah, too-easy problems. Say what you will about Lang's exposition, but the problem sets are excellent. Much like Rudin, it sticks around because of good problems and because standardization is nice.
I also unironically think his real and functional/complex analysis textbooks are excellent, although they're still in the same formalist style.
Most graduate analysis textbooks are written by analysts who are in love with analysis. Lang was a pretentious elitist algebraist, so his analysis books are "here's all the stuff a non-analyst might ever need and nothing else in one convenient yellow box". That's not an easy thing to find elsewhere.
