My copy of baby Rudin (Principles of Mathematical Analysis) was the first "real" math textbook I used. It was notorious at the bookstore. At $135, it was more than a dollar per piece of paper, and smaller than a volume of poetry, with decently sized text and a good layout. But make no mistake--it could kill a man, and it was well worth every penny.
It's not an exaggeration to say that you could spend a whole hour working through a single page, and in fact that's what the first day in my Real Analysis class was: learning how hardcore math is really done. It has an astonishing economy of expression, where everything you need to understand a proof is written, but if you blink you'll have to start over. It doesn't just feed you facts and theorems to memorize. Skill is developed in the process of reading, because reading this book requires unpacking explanations, filling in details, and making connections for yourself.
The closest analogy I can make is that it's like watching a grandmaster play a real game of chess, when all your previous chess lessons had been finding the correct four moves from a handful of common positions. It's not necessarily the best or easiest way to learn real analysis itself, but having learned real analysis from that book, you are prepared to not only learn, but master, any other type of math you happen to come across.
It's not an exaggeration to say that you could spend a whole hour working through a single page, and in fact that's what the first day in my Real Analysis class was: learning how hardcore math is really done. It has an astonishing economy of expression, where everything you need to understand a proof is written, but if you blink you'll have to start over. It doesn't just feed you facts and theorems to memorize. Skill is developed in the process of reading, because reading this book requires unpacking explanations, filling in details, and making connections for yourself.
The closest analogy I can make is that it's like watching a grandmaster play a real game of chess, when all your previous chess lessons had been finding the correct four moves from a handful of common positions. It's not necessarily the best or easiest way to learn real analysis itself, but having learned real analysis from that book, you are prepared to not only learn, but master, any other type of math you happen to come across.
Requiescat in pace.