This popular and successful text was originally written for a one-semester course in linear algebra at the sophomore undergraduate level. Consequently, the book deals almost exclusively with real finite dimensional vector spaces, but in a setting and formulation that permits easy generalisation to abstract vector spaces. A wide selection of examples of vector spaces and linear transformation is presented to serve as a testing ground for the theory. In the second edition, a new chapter on Jordan normal form was added which reappears here in expanded form as the second goal of this new edition, after the principal axis theorem. To achieve these goals in one