Most of those should be pretty readable with your background , Lang isn ' t as bad as people make it out to be . Although Hartshorne is pretty terrifying , I hear . It makes sense to learn category theory in the context of alg top and rep theory because it gives concrete examples . If you ' re comfortable with abstraction it should be fine though . Just make sure you get some under your belt before doing commutative algebra <| sep |> He ' s a dead man walking . of course granted all that email was in a file marked ' life insurance '. maybe it ' s w o r k i n g w h a t s g o i n g o nwithanthonyweinerslaptop <| sep |> It ' s a privilege . <| sep |> Who are these people that you are referring to ? <| sep |> Ok I misread the first comment by a lot . What Bret said was pretty ew as it was pretty smug and condescending , but I can somewhat see where he was coming from . He was trying to defuse the thing from what I saw . So while I do not think what he said was good for that time , I can somewhat see his reasoning regardless of its impact . TLdrI misread first comment , deserve the downvotes , but also think it could have been the right move if done differently