No bullshit guide to linear algebra
This textbook covers the material for an undergraduate linear algebra course: vectors, matrices, linear transformations, computational techniques, geometric constructions, and theoretical foundations. The explanations are given in an informal conversational tone. The book also contains 100+ problems and exercises with answers and solutions. A special feature of this textbook is the prerequisites chapter that covers topics from high school math, which are necessary for learning linear algebra. The presence of this chapter makes the book suitable for beginners and the general audience-readers need not be math experts to read this book. Another unique aspect of the book are the applications chapters (Ch 7, 8, and 9) that discuss applications of linear algebra to engineering, computer science, economics, chemistry, machine learning, and even quantum mechanics.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
33mentions
19people
2013–2026years
76% recommend21% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My personal favorite is No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra - it gives a really good overview of math fundamentals and overall strikes a good balance between keeping things simple and giving enough insight to comfortably dig deeper in the topic.
- This is great. I really appreciate visual explanations and the way you build up the motivation. I'm using a few resources to learn linear algebra right now, including "The No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra", which has been pretty decent so far. Does anyone have other recommendations? I've found a lot of books to be too dense or academic for what I need. My goal is to develop a practical, working understanding I can apply directly.
- I bought "No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra" a number of years ago, and it was super useful for me to get closer to grokking the math behind it (as someone who flunked out of calc in school).
Ivan was also really helpful when I emailed him with some stupid questions -- way above and beyond.
- I've found the "No bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra" pretty good. Could be worth checking it out. It's the one resource that has things click more for me.
- Wow thanks for the plug!
Here is also the concept map from the book for people to see what topics are covered in it: https://minireference.com/static/conceptmaps/math_and_physic...
Since you mentioned DSP, you might want to also check out this excerpt on Fourier transformations from the No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/fourier_transforma...
- Personally I liked the No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra. It kind of builds up things slowly and in a conversational manner, but you can also skip thru pretty quickly if you just need a reference.
I don't think I've been able to find any particularly good visual LinAlg books - most of what you're trying to achieve is actually quite abstract and I found the classic books a little confusing.
As an addendum - if you live stateside, classes at community colleges may be quite inexpensive and fairly approachable.
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