I own this book and I'll tell you it's not easy learning math from this book. Most of it is just very light overview. There are much better rigorous textbooks that are simpler and more complete.

There are some great textbooks translated from Russian. Analysis by Kolmogorov, (rigorous) Linear Algebra by Shilov, Complex Analysis by Markushevich to name a few.

That's why I said it's good companion.

The book covers too much to be thorough. Each chapter gives good introduction to the subject matter and ends with list of suggested reading.

I always read the relevant parts from this book before going deeper. Not everyone is going to dwell into non-euclidean geometry, functional analysis and topology.

Furthermore, I don't think typical self studying engineer in Hacker News wants to learn math using rigorous introduction to analysis. You can get good working knowledge and intuition without knowing what delta epsilon is.

I agree with you, that book is great for giving an overview of the general areas of mathematics and for providing context before going deeper into an area. I've used it to get some background in the courses I'm taking classes on before the semester starts and have found that really helpful.

Well, there is no shortage of very good and VERY SIMPLE and rigorous intros to analysis books out today:

How to Think About Analysis by Lara Alcock.

Understanding Analysis by Stephen Abbot.

Mathematical Analysis and Proof by David Stirling.

Numbers and Functions: Steps into Analysis by Burn.

Analysis: With an Introduction to Proof by Steven Lay.

A First Course in Mathematical Analysis by David Brannan.

This is a good book, although I agree with others that truly learning from it would be difficult. If you like this, another book you might really enjoy is the Princeton Companion to Mathematics.

This is an absolutely beautiful book, aesthetically, and does a good job of conveying some of the wonder of mathematics.

>Usually good books travel from English speaking world to other languages as translations.

How do you know that?

There are some numbers for this in David Bellos "Is that a fish in your ear?"[1], chapter 19.

An UNESCO study of translations between Swedish, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, French, German and English over a decade showed that 104,000 of the 132,000 translations made between all those languages were translations from English.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/That-Fish-Your-Ear-Translation/dp/0865...

>Usually good books travel from English speaking world to other languages as translations

Yeah, no. Usually good books get translated, period.

From Homer and the Bible to Pascal, Leibiz, Dostoyevsky, Godel and Einstein, good books fly the other way around all the time.

>Yeah, no. Usually good books get translated, period.

Great books certainly get translated in every direction. But for merely good books, I wouldn't be surprised if readers outside the US consumed more books translated from English than readers in the US consume books translated from other languages.

Why?

I don't think so for the simple reason that academic books in English usually aren't translated because people in countries outside of the US can read English. Even academic books that do not have any native English speaking authors are usually written in English. Books are more likely to be translated to English than from English, because translating to English multiplies the size of the audience many times, whereas the other way around does not.

Quite americano-centric, no ?

Considering that the average reader reads more in Europe than in the US and that there is a very dynamic domestic industry in many of these countries, I would say the opposite.

And I didn't even take India and China into account...

source: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nop-world-culture-sc...