I don't recall where, when, or why I acquired this book, but I now feel vindication for my reference library, because this book was exactly what I needed when I was perusing my shelves in hopes of an uncluttered answer to a question in my job (what's the question? um, well, my boss is a tad paranoid about even remotely proprietary information). The relevant section is near the end of the book, but linear algebra was awhile ago, so I began at the beginning. I did just a smattering of the exercises as reassurance that I more or less got the gist, and I won't claim full understanding of every theorem, and a test would be alarming, but I read through to the end without skipping, and I am applying what I learned to an actual legitimate real life problem, so dammit I'm going to count this as a "read" book. It's quite a nice book, 111 pages coherently and concisely focused on exactly what the title says. What is a transformation? It is a rule for getting an object from here to there. Examples: rotation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_%28geometry%29), reflection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_%28mathematics%29), translation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_%28geometry%29, scaling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaling_%28geometry%29).

(read 3 Jul 2011)

Concise, straightforward, and comprehensible explication of lin. a. up through eigenvectors and conics.