Real Analysis

Bluntly, with only occasional exceptions, have to learn from the books. Period. No biggie: Once are in grad school or a prof, have to learn from papers, and the good books are typically MUCH easier to read than the papers! For first calculus, read one of the well respected books. In my experience and opinion, don't need high school advanced placement calculus -- regard it as a waste of time. Also the last time I looked at Khan Academy, I concluded that it was a waste or worse and by people who didn't have a good background in calculus. Generally the Internet sources are too elementary. Solution: Just use some good books. Protter and Morrey is good (I taught from it), but it is a bit elementary. I learned from Johnson and Kiokmeister; I like it. At the time it was also being used at Harvard. The exercises are especially good. It's old, but calculus hasn't changed much since 1950 or so about when it gave up on teaching infinitesimals. But might check out the Maxima software for symbolic indefinite integration -- as I recall, its algorithms are so good they do any indefinite integration that can be done in closed form.…

Linear algebra, and more than one such book. IMHO long and still the best linear algebra book is Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces (FDVS). It was written in 1942 when Halmos was an "assistant" to John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study. It is intended to be finite dimensional vector spaces but done with the techniques of Hilbert space. The central result in the book, according to Halmos, is the spectral decomposition. One result at a time, the quality of von Neumann comes through. Commonly physicists have been given that book as their introduction to Hilbert space for quantum mechanics. But FDVS is a little too much for a first book on linear algebra, or maybe even a second book, should be maybe a third one. Also high quality is Nering, Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory. Again, the quality comes through: Nering was a student of Artin at Princeton. There Nering does most of linear algebra on just finite fields, not just the real and complex fields; finite fields in linear algebra are important in error correcting codes. So, that finite field work is a good introduction to abstract algebra.…