Ask HN: Any recommendations on a modern/good set theory book?
I've been hunting for a quality textbook on elementary set theory for about a year without much success. What I'm looking for is a modern text that covers subject matter from first principles save perhaps logic. Out of the many books I looked at I bought the following three:
1. "Set Theory: A First Course" by Daniel Cunningham: this book is a good reference book but makes too many assumptions to teach yourself set theory. I actually had to buy this one twice since Amazon didn't deliver the first!
2. "Elements of Set Theory" by Herbert Enderton: This book is actually not too bad and I may have to default to it if I find nothing better. This book however is ancient and I'll have to buy a physical copy because the math symbols were drawn before TeX was invented.
3. "Naive Set Theory" by Paul Halmos: This book was complete garbage hands down, no more needs to be said.
In addition to those three books, there were many that obviously were either too brief in coverage of the subject matter and assumed much too fast or I was unable to find previews in able to judge their quality and thus decided against the gamble to buy.
Is set theory even taught in college? I've been through the major educational publisher's catalogs and couldn't find anything on set theory other than #1 from Cambridge. The best book so far wasn't even about set theory, it was MIT's phonology textbook by Bale and Reiss (which I highly recommend, easily one of the best textbooks I've ever come across).
If set theory really is the foundation of modern mathematics you would think there would be a decent textbook on the subject. I would have posted this question to math.stackexchange but what I've learned is that, at least for mathematicians, seem to recommend either books that are arcane, obscure, or are way too advanced to be useful for the user whom is asking the question.
So HN, I'm desperate and could use any recommendations offered, thanks!
This post does not have any comments yet