On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:41:50 -0700 (PDT), fero
Hi, I would like to buy some booke on category theory and its applications. Can you recommend me the best?
Recently, I had to study some category theory in order to prepare for a local category theory study group meeting, and after some comparison, settled on the following relatively short set (128 pp.) of notes, condensed from a much thicker book (303 pp.) on category theory: Category Theory Lecture Notes for ESSLLI Michael Barr, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill University Charles Wells, Department of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University http://www.math.upatras.gr/~cdrossos/Docs/B-W-LectureNotes.pdf The above-mentioned lecture notes were condensed from the following book, and then rearranged to present category theory from a computer science perspective: Toposes, Triples and Theories by Michael Barr and Charles Wells http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/math/wells/pub/ttt.html According to the above-referenced home page for this book:
The original book, Grundlehren der math. Wissenschaften 278. Springer-Verlag, 1983, is now out of print. A revised and corrected version is now available free for downloading.
An even shorter book on category theory is the following: A Gentle Introduction to Category Theory - the calculational approach by Maarten M Fokkinga http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~fokkinga/mmf92b.html However, I did not prefer the above book, despite its brevity, because unlike the other two titles, it did not including any specific material on monads.
What do you think about "Categories and Computer Science (Cambridge Computer Science Texts)" at http://www.amazon.com/Categories-Computer-Science-Cambridge-Texts/dp/0521422... ?
I haven't read it, so I would need to review it before giving an opinion. I shall keep it in mind, however; thank you for the reference. -- Benjamin L. Russell