[_hardwaregeek]

Linear Algebra, at least at my school, is taught pretty poorly. Instead of teaching the beauty of transformations, the course is boggled down in numerical nonsense and tedious calculations (who wants to find the inverse of a 3x3 matrix? Bueller? Bueller?). Only after learning Algebra and homomorphisms, isomorphisms and automorphisms did I appreciate the importance of linear transformations. Stuff like Singular Value Decomposition gets a lot more interesting once you know some basic Algebra. I suppose Linear can't get too abstract because non math majors have to take it, but starting from generalized ideas of transformations is a far better way to teach it imo.

[postsantum]

That was exactly my experience. Struggled with matrices theory at uni doing some bullshit exercises but started to grasp the topic only when I needed to apply some linear transformation in a game

[datasciencetext]

I think the situation has improved somewhat as visualization tools have become easier to use. We made this simple visual [1] to help people understand what they might get out of linear algebra, and it was easy enough for some statisticians to accomplish.

[1]https://datasciencetexts.com/subjects/linear_algebra.html

[steve19]

Nice site, but it's worth giving some info about yourself on the site and why I should trust your advice, given that these books are expensive.

In elementary machine learning, you give two options. You should really include introduction to statistical learning by the same folks who wrote ESL. It's a great book that covers the same ground as ESL but with less math.

[datasciencetext]

Thanks for the feedback! ISL is indeed a good option, especially for the more application-oriented; it's on the todo list!

[swiley]

At mine we have an "applied" linear algebra course for engineering students and the "normal" one that math people take.

I didn't pass the "normal" one but I think that's because I had another 300 level math course, capstone, and four other CS courses at the same time. I'm certain I wouldn't have passed the applied one, it looked very tedious and that's usually what gets me with homework.