Title: Distracting focus on examples
Product review: I am a graduate student at UC Berkeley who used this book for an introductory course in Lie theory.I found that Hall's book focuses too much on examples, often allowing the reader to lose sight of the underlying algebra. In the midst of hacking and slashing one's way through matrix computations, one fails to gain a deeper, and more valuable intuition for what Lie groups and Lie algebras are.My classmates discovered and took a liking toFulton and Harris. I wound up usingHumphreys. Humphreys suffers the opposite failing, of being overly sparse and direct, but it succeeds in conveying an appreciation for the elegance of Lie algebras.
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