Basic Complex Analysis

Rating:
Summary: Thanks to Amazon.com and Reviewers!!!
Review: I am glad to see the price of this book dropped after reviewers made their negative comments about the price of this book! It seems to me the Amazon.com's review are read by publishers. It is a great thing for readers to write their honest comments especially teachers, experts and students. I like to address my review to teachers who teach introductory complex analysis or complex variables. The best textbook is by all standards Henri Cartan's Dover book. Each week, I post my own problem sets on intranet. Together we can make a change to limit the proliferation of unneccessary textbooks (if there is a better one and... ten times cheaper!), at least, we can contribute to save more trees!

Rating:
Summary: A versatile introduction to the subject.
Review: I used an earlier edition of this text as an instructor 20 years ago. The students in my class at the time were equally divided among the fields of mathematics, physics, and engineering. The book proved to be quite useful for all of them. Marsden skillfully strikes a balance between the needs of math majors preparing for graduate study and the needs of physics and engineering students seeking applications of complex analysis.

The book is clearly written and well-organized, with plenty of examples and exercises. My only significant criticism of the first edition was the author's tendency to label many examples of contour integration as theorems. Technically, there is nothing wrong this, but I found that some of my students tended to memorize the statements of these "theorems" rather than focus on the methods of integration discussed (for example, "Pac-Man" integrals with branch cuts along rays other than the positive real axis). Nonetheless, this is a fine text that has--not surprisingly--continued to be widely used for over two decades.

Rating:
Summary: Quite Dry
Review: This is the second book that I have read beside the Vector Calculus by Marsden and Hoffman. This book rushes you through with an introductory chapter and go right into the heart of complex analysis. The author assumes you to have a great professors that can explain things in detail when you can't quite understand what is written in the text. Unfortunately I did not have a great instructor.

The examples of the book are quite simple, compare to some end of section problems.

Overall this book has no surprises as it is quite dry, got bored from reading it. If it was not a required text book for a 3rd year complex analysis course, i wouldn't recommend it to anyone. There are many other books out there that are better written.