Taste in math textbooks is highly personal and depends on your idiosyncratic learning style. This book matches my preferences quite well. It isn't one of these big glossy monsters full of biographical notes about mathematicians and pictures of waterfalls, and it isn't a papa Rudin where you spend nine hours poring over a single page. Some of the rigor that I would have liked in the main text is relegated to appendices, but it's all there, so that's OK. The book shows some signs of its origin as a sequence of lecture notes, but that's not a real problem.