Rated 3 out of 5
This book rid me of the sense I was missing insight for not knowing any algebraic topology. I don't regret putting the effort in, and as far as I know it was the path of least resistance to this. I was interested in Janich for this purpose but avoided it since it has no exercises.<br/><br/>The second half of the book is on simplicial homology which, in principle, keeps objects concrete. Some explanations didn't work on me: in spite of examples, I couldn't develop a picture of the simplicial approximation theorem through the explanation given. The book would likely be great with an instructor but I didn't have that luxury. Exercises and sections are uneven in importance and difficulty. Some I found to be impossible. The last section doesn't make sense without knowing some commutative algebra words (I didn't know them). <br/><br/>The open source solution manual may as well not exist: I found a severe, obvious, irreparable errors every time I consulted it. Some true/false questions are even answered wrong with false justification.