>>12301407I've only skimmed through them, but from the categories they choose as motivating examples, I can say that both are more advanced than Aluffi, in that if you aren't already familiar with the material that Aluffi covers, you won't gain much (if any) understanding from reading either of them. Unless you unironically want to be that undergraduate category theory tranny who memorizes the entire category theory lexicon without understanding what any of the words mean, in which case you might as well just read the Wikipedia articles instead of wasting your time with textbooks.
>>12301472Riehl reminds me of CWM but breezier, it looks alright as long as you know what you're doing.
Not familiar with Fong/Spivak (or specifically, with the subjects they're trying to apply category theory to), but I can't see anything in there that's worth using category theory for, that graphs don't already do better. Outside of field theory, the only justified "non-mathematical" use-case for category theory that I've come across is the use of monads in functional programming. So if you want to learn category theory from an applied perspective, maybe try picking up a purely functional programming language like Haskell or something. (But I am not a programmer, so take this with a block of salt.)
