I used Arthur Mattuck's "Introduction to Analysis" when I last taught this course, and I thought it did a great job. --Michael On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 5:17 PM, James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu> wrote:

I'll be teaching real analysis in the Fall, and I'm looking for a good textbook to use. Do any of you have suggestions?

I've looked at Kenneth Ross' book, which I heard was easier than Royden or "baby Rudin", but I think it's still going to be rough going for the average student in my class; the students at my current school are hard- working but typically not as prepared for proof-oriented mathematics as students at other schools I've taught at.

Two texts that I'm tempted by (based solely on what I've read on the web) are "Yet Another Introduction to Analysis" by Victor Bryant and "A Friendly Introduction to Analysis" by Witold A.J. Kosmala. Do any of you know anything about either of them?

To point out a (possibly forced) connection between my question and the charter of the math-fun email discussion group, let me add that one thing a good real analysis textbook should do, in my opinion, is make the material as fun as possible!

Also, for those of you who might be interested in my ideas on how to teach completeness of the reals via an axiom about cutting R into two pieces, my current thoughts can be found at jamespropp.org/cut.pdf . Comments are welcome.

Jim Propp

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