Benjamin C. Pierce

Terse. Maybe too terse, but a lot of my issues would have been resolved had I realized there was an appendix of notation at the back of the book. Serves as a pretty solid introduction to category theory, but provides absolutely no indication as to *why one might want to know category theory*. The treatment is primarily for organizing ones thoughts about abstract structures rather than actually working with them. The book very briefly mentions representability, with no discussion of the show more Yoneda lemma (which I understand to be one of the more useful parts of category theory).

I read this as part of MIRI's recommended reading list. show less

I believe this is an excellent introduction to Category theory, and I believe that *someday* I'll make it through this book. But considered as applied mathematics, I just don't get the point of the high level of abstraction, though there must be something to it because the type theory and programming language communities have adopted it with great glee.