Best book for an introduction to Category Theory?

Best book for an introduction to Category Theory?

Other urls found in this thread:

arxiv.org/pdf/1612.09375.pdf
sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~noson/MCtext.html
amazon.com/Conceptual-Mathematics-First-Introduction-Categories
cs.ox.ac.uk/bob.coecke/Cats.pdf
mitpress.mit.edu/books/category-theory-sciences
amazon.com/gp/aw/d/052171916X/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

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Personally I like Emily Riehls "Category Theory in Context", although it does not offer a lot besides the really basic stuff. If you've worked through that, I would suggest going to MacLane for a more thorough discussion on enrichment, monoids and so on and so forth. I don't really like MacLane as a primary source because I feel it is a bit outdated. Still, it is a very nice book. Alternatively you could have a look at "Categories and Sheaves" by Kashiwa and Shapira, especially if you're more interested in homological algebra.

Thank you anons, to be noted: i'm an undergrad physicist so i think i only need the basic stuff for its applications to theoretical physics (although i would be interested in learning the subject in more depth)

I think it is crucial for your understanding and intuition that you're able to find and understand good examples for the categorical objects indroduced in the mentioned books. I can't speak for Leinster's book, but in Riehl's book a lot of examples from basic algebra come up (e.g. tensor products, group actions, some stuff about graphs etc.). So having previous knowledge of these things (or alternatively some knowledge of algebraic topology) is quite useful (and essential in my opinion).

>tensor products, group actions, some stuff about graphs etc.
I've read basic multilinear algebra and also group theory..i would like to believe i can proceed to category theory.

That rooms needs to be organised.

its comfy af tho

Most examples aren't really elaborate, it's more about rephrasing stuff in categorical terms. Basic category theory is not hard at all, pretty much every proof you can figure out by yourself, it's just that you might miss the point if you don't have anything concrete to apply the notions to. But if you're familiar with the examples I mentioned (or something else on a comparable level), then I think you're good to go.

nice. thank you user