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There is no ideal text for a beginning one semester course as taught in the US to first or second year college students. Older books like H&K treat only the abstract theory, in a fairly conceptual way and (if I recall correctly) with maps written on the right contrary to what students do in calculus. A later generation of books like the original Anton are also pure math books but start by overemphasizing unrealistic manipulations with small matrices and vectors; then there is an abrupt shift to abstraction. Determinants are presented in a purely computational mode, as though they were really used for this purpose; then eigenvalues occur very late and again in oversimplified small examples. Fortunately the newer texts tend to mix pure and applied throughout, but as a result they contain far too much material for a first course. And eigenvalue theory still gets introduced very late. Strang is attractive in many ways, but too loosely written down and not suitable for an inexperienced reader without a reliable guide at hand. Aside from Strang, the emphasis in most US textbooks remains placed on unrealistic integer calculations with very small matrices rather than on the geometry of subspaces, etc. The pervasive role of geometric thinking in the subject is mostly downplayed in texts, as is the role of analysis. For self-study, something like Friedberg-Insel-Spence may be the best compromise choice.