I took a course in linear algebra when I was in grad school, took a graphics course (which is basically applied linear algebra), watched the 3 blue 1 brown linear algebra series on YouTube and have spent some time looking at machine learning algorithms (which seem to be basically applied linear algebra) and I still don't feel like I have any real intuitive sense of the topic. Whenever I read an algorithm description that includes a matrix multiplication, say, I understand exactly what they did, but I've never looked at a problem and thought to myself, "ah, that's a problem for linear algebra!"

it’s a good undergrad book. also on that page he says lights out game is a “linear algebra problem”. It’s actually not. incidentally I worked on Lights out for my thesis, and my advisor made a whole career out of lights out! That game relates to Fibonacci polynomials, studied in Combinatorics - https://www.unf.edu/~wkloster/fib.html

How would you compare coding the matrix to strang ?

I'm going to be starting out on one of these and coding-the-matrix is very python centric (which is super helpful and practical) versus MATLAB in Strang's book.

this is classic “mistaking the map for the territory”.

whether the code is in python or matlab matters little. the code is just a supplement to the main material which is still math. trying to understand that math by reading code is actively counterproductive and actually quite foolish. my professor gave a symposium talk on this topic, so i will use one of his examples -

At 0 minutes you have 0 dollars. suppose each minute you toss a coin. if it’s heads you make a dollar. if it’s tails you pay a dollar out of your pocket. What are the chances you’ll have $30 in an hour ?

This is the sort of classic problem that can be coded up in python or matlab under 5 minutes. it’s just a for loop & an if statement. It won’t tell you much about the actual probability because that number is so small your code will have to run for a long time to get a meaningful answer. Whereas it’s trivial if you just do the math by hand.

it just happens that i dont want to download and install matlab on my computer (which is company provided) and i'd rather work on python if there is an equally good course.

not what you thought though.