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Preface How to Use This Book (*)

Similarly to music and art, mathematics is learned by doing, not just by reading texts and listening to lectures. Doing the exercises in this text is the best way to get a feel for the material, to see what you understand, and to identify what needs further study. Exercises range from routine examples to rather tricky proofs. The exercises have been arranged in order so that in the course of working on an exercise, you may use any previous theorem or exercise (whether or not you did it), but not any subsequent result (unless stated otherwise). Some exercises are used in the text, and are so labeled.