Linear Algebra Textbook I'm looking for a textbook on Linear Algebra and I seem to have narrowed down the list to:

  
*
  
*Linear Algebra by Hoffman and Kunze; and
  
*Linear Algebra by Friedberg, Insel and Spence.
  

I'm not quite sure which textbook to commit to since I can't seem to distinguish between them based on their individual merits and demerits.
It'd be great if someone could weigh out the merits and demerits (exercises, content, depth etc.) of both books.
Thanks.
 A: Hoffman and Kunze is the classic rigorous linear algebra textbook. My old mentor Nick Metas was one of the team of graduate students at MIT who worked over the manuscript of the original lecture notes for the course. The book is brutally mathematical with very few examples.That being said,it's very carefully written with many details in the proofs and definitions. If you're willing to work hard and you're serious about learning linear algebra as pure mathematics,you can hardly do better. But you'll need to supplement it for exercises and examples. 
Linear Algebra by Friedberg, Insel and Spence is probably the single most comprehensive linear algebra textbook on the market. It's extremely careful with a ton of examples and it blends pure theory with applications very well.It's far more detailed and readable then Hoffman and Kunze and contains many applications you won't find in other textbooks, such as stochastic matrices. It also has many wonderful exercises. I just have 2 minor quibbles with it. First,in some ways,it's too comprehensive-to use the book in a course,even a year long course,one would have to be quite selective with it. Second-the section on the Jordan form and the diagonalization procedure is simply put, a trainwreck. This is a really important topic,so this really hurts the book.
