Praise for Just and Weese!

From time to time I do get more than a bit critical here about books of one sort or another: so it’s good to give praise for once!

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading the first volume of Winfried Just and Martin Weese’s Discovering Modern Set Theory (AMS, 1996), with an eye to moving on to the second volume. Well, I just loved the style, and think it works very well. I don’t mean the occasional (sightly laboured?) jokes: I mean the in-the-classroom feel of the way that proofs are explored and motivated, and also the way that teach-yourself exercises are integrated into the text. For instance there are exercises that encourage you to produce proofs that are in fact non-fully justified, and then the discussion explores what goes wrong and how to plug the gaps. My grip on set theoretic niceties is patchy enough to be find this kind of reinforcement of understanding pretty helpful from time to time, even at the elementary level of the first volume. So I’ll be rather warmly recommending the book to students.