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First of all, this title shouldn't be included in the "Graduate Texts in Mathematics" series because the material it covers is covered in introductory undergraduate courses. Second, eventhough the author made a great effort to include as much topics as he could, the treatment of most of them is highly old-fashioned. I mean, he pays no attention to the most recent and elegant refinements of the basic theory, so the student is not immediately able to understand the real important ideas behind the subject. For example, nowadays the proof of the Cauchy integral formula is presented as a more ar less easy corollary of the general Stokes theorem. The Cauchy integral theorem is also obtained easily following the same fashion. Incredibly, the author explores this line in one appendix, but not well done, and apparently he doesn't realize that there is the key idea.
Also, keeping in mind that holomorphic functions are harmonic, most of the important results for holomorphic functions should follow at once from the corresponding ones for harmonic functions, but this old-fashioned texts don't take this remarkable important feature of complex analysis into account, making the treatment innecessarily complicated and leading the student to misunderstand both complex and harmonic analysis. Eventhough the book includes a whole chapter on harmonic functions, the author doesn't use their power as he should.
I'm afraid there are few famous introductory texts that I would suggest for first-timers. The best of them is Markushevitch, unfortunately out of print.
There is also another serious drawback: The author pays no attention at all to boundary value problems and therefore to the Cauchy-type integral, maybe the most important tool of complex analysis. The Hilbert transform is also not present.
If you have the opportunity take a look at Muskhelishvili's "Singular Integral Equations" and Gakhov's "Boundary Value Problems" and then you will understand my point.
Lang's book could be used as a companion text and as a reference for introductory courses. It's got some interestig excercises.
Its contents are: Complex Nubers and Functions; Power Series; Cauchy's Theorem, First Part; Winding Numbers and Cauchy's Theorem; Applications of Cauchy's Integral Formula; Calculus of Residues; Conformal Mappings; Harmonic Functions; Schwartz Reflection; The Riemann Mapping Theorem; Analytic Continuation Along Curves; Applications of the Maximum Principle and jensen's Formula; Entire and Meromorphic Functions; Elliptic Fuctions; The Gamma and Zeta Functions; The Prime number Theorem; Appendices.
Please take a look to the rest of my reviews (just click on my name above).
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The book is quite up-to-date and deals with current and historical educational issues in an honest and up-front manner.
I highly recommend this book to anyone teaching an introduction to education course.
The one drawback is the quality of the supporting materials. The teacher's guide is not well constructed and at the time I used the text, no test back or items were available.
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I'd have used the money back guarantee if there was one as I expected a bit more from it.
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The author is a medical doctor and he uses medical analogies to describe the action of love as if it were an essential hormone. Negative emotions such as fear are like "drugs" that pollute the system and "block" the action of love, just like a beta-blocker drug blocks the action of adrenalin, for certain heart conditions. Thus "love-blockage" keeps us from experiencing love.
The author is a Christian writer, but anyone with any background can read this book and obtain a deeper understanding of the truer meaning of love.
I am definitely glad I read this book, and I highly recommend reading this book to anyone searching to get a deeper understanding of the meaning of love.