Visual Complex Analysis Book

From a blog post I wrote just after picking this book up:

"Sweet Feynman has it been a fun last couple days! I picked up Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis from the University of Waterloo library and this book has reminded me why I fell in love with math as a wee lad. The book's pedagogical approach is to teach math the way mathematicians actually think about it - visually. Needham's book is chock full of nifty pictures of Riemann spheres, conformal mappings, branches, and more. Complex analysis is an absolutely beautiful subject when couched in geometric terms and is accessible to anyone with a bit of calculus under their belt.

This was also a change of approach to learning for me. Usually, I get generally interested in a subject, pick a textbook, and read it cover to cover, doing the problems as I go. This time, however, my explorations in complex analysis were motivated by a very specific research application, so I dove right into the middle of the book to extract the particular pieces I needed.

I've noticed that I seem to learn much more quickly with an application in mind like this. Further investigations are needed, but this might hint at a more efficient and productive approach to learning for me - first, find a particular problem that requires the tools I'm interested in and then, go off and learn them. This is fun because every new topic I stumble upon in Needham's book gives me new insights into the problem I'm working on."