[srean]

This is a great book but and as the author himself notes, it's not an ideal first linear algebra book.

Strang can be great as a first book. He focuses more on what rather than why, so if one wants to delve deeper, it needs to be supplemented by a few other books.

[mamonster]

I still don't get why Axler decided to discuss the Jordan normal form after already doing the spectral theorem, it's a bit like presenting Riemannian integration after Lebesgue.

For the long term his emphasis on operators is probably better as naturally transitions into functional analysis, but you can get a lot of stuff done without ever touching them.

[KalMann]

Did you misstate your comment? The Jordan normal form is more general than spectral decomposition so it should come after.

[mamonster]

I'm open to being corrected, but AFAIK the normal form (1870) precedes the official focus on operators (with Hilbert) by like 20-30 years.

[srean]

KalMann is correct. Jordan canonical form decomposition is more general. Every matrix in an algebraically closed field will have such a decomposition. This is not true for spectral decomposition. Only diagonalizable matrices will have a spectral decomposition and they are a smaller subset.

That said, Jordan form is uglier than spectral decomposition, to my taste that is. Spectral decomposition so beautiful and neat.