>>14310726Honestly, at first, as a beginner pivoting from engineering, I thought the best analysis text book was Abbott's understanding analysis. His explanations, step by step, really broken down proofs made a first foray into analysis digestible, however it never felt like I had achieved anything when reading this book.
Luckily, my analysis prof. Used rudin, he always said "Rudin is hard as nails and it may even make you cry at some point, but thats the god damn idea, if you wanna do math, you gotta man up!" But I always took this as boomer ramblings and simply thought rudins book was dry, boring, and pointlessly general.
So I was stuck between 2 books, one too simple and the other way too hard, so I started going thru all analysis texts I could get my hands on in a desperate search for a reasonable middle ground. I went thru Tao's analysis, Rossmann's analysis, Spivak, Apostol, Goldberg's, heck I even checked out Lick's advaced calculus, all to no avail.
I ended up going thru the following semester insatisfied with my literary sources, and had the same issue the following one.
Once I moved from real analysis and delved into other topics I forgot about rudin for a while, fast forward to present day, currently in grad school for applied math and I haven't touched a real analysis book in ages, until the other day when a friend asked me something on riemann integration.
I had to go thru all my old literature, again trying to find the perfect middle ground answer, but now it was different, everything seemed to beat around the bush, everything seemed too watered down, so I decided to open up Rudin and check his account of things. I was surprised, Rudins explanation was concise and to the point, slick and elegant, simply superior. I then realized Rudin was best all along. My professor was right, I just had to man up.
In short, man up and read Rudin.
