[henning]

Rudin is deceptive. At UCSD it takes a full academic year to get through that book. It is damn hard. UCSD was recently ranked in the top 50 universities in the world so it is not some lousy lazy place.

If you're going to try to learn that stuff on your own you'll need other books to supplement it and provide examples, counter-examples, intuition, and alternative explanations.

[jedbrown]

It's an undergrad text so it can't assume a great deal of mathematical maturity, hence everything takes longer.