Schaum's Outline of General Topology

Rating:
Summary: Great resource for college-level math students...
Review: I wish I had known about this summary when I was taking my Fundamental Concepts in Math course at the university. I would have done a lot better! I agree with the previous reviewer about adding REA's Problem Solver book for a complete set.

The topics covered include: (1) Sets and relations, (2) Functions, (3) Cardinality and Order, (4) Topology of the line and plane, (5) Topological Spaces, (6) Bases and Subbases [sic], (7) Continuity and topological equivalence, (7) Metric and normed spaces, (8)Countability, (10) Separation axioms, (11) Compactness, (12) Product spaces, (13) Connectedness, (14) Complete metric spaces, and (15) Function spaces. There is an appendix about Properties of real numbers.

This is a technical book and not for a casual reader. I believe this will be difficult for a teach-yourself-to-know reader, unless the reader has considerable math experience.

Another book that I found helpful in Fundamental Concepts (not simply Topology) was Courant et al., What is mathematics? 2nd ed.

My Fundamental Concepts professor taught the course with only lecture notes, and I was completely lost. Had I had this outline, I think I would have done better, because this Outline has a number of solved problems and exercises.

Good luck.

Rating:
Summary: If you are a good researcher, this is a good resource!
Review: If you are taking an introductory Topology course, I recommend using this book. It is a little old, and some of the problems are not solved, but it will offer you an advantage when using your class text. You should use Lipschutz's book together with REA's Topology Problem Solver to give you full study advantage when taking on this most difficult subject. With some moderate study, you should do better on your assignements!