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Title: A horrible treatment.
Review: Strang tells us in the preface that linear algebra is a beautiful subject, and he is correct. Yet he seems intent on strangling its theoretical beauty with a matrix based approach to vector spaces, and an ugly preoccupation with R^n. It's clear that this book was not written to be either a lucid explanation of how to use linear algebra, nor was it intended to be an aesthetically pleasing exposition of theoretical linear algebra. It was written somewhere in between, and it is an unhappy medium. If you are interested in a theoretical treatment of linear algebra, there are sorrowfully few good texts available. The title of Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right" is a result of this fact, and if you are seeking a mathematically pure treatment of the subject, that book is a much better choice. If you're not interested in the theory, but only the applications, you should still be able to find a much better text than Strang's.
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