Hello!

In my opinion, the good algebraic geometry textbooks for a beginner are the foll
owing: Gortz, Ravi Vakil's Notes, Gathmann's Notes, Fulton, and Bump's book.
These all depend upon what you're interests are:
Vakil's Notes: Everyone says that they are the best notes ever. This is contenti
ous. They are really, really good at having a lot of material on a topic. I mean
, Vakil's content on any one topic, say closed embeddings, is SO much more vast
than most other books that when you go look at something like Hartshorne you say
"there is nothing in this book!" This is good, and this is bad. It's good becau
se this learning by deluge really forces you to see it all, so that you don't le
ave with a cursory knowledge of anything. It is bad because, well, it's a deluge
. Vakil wants to set up everything very carefully. He wants you to really, reall
y have seen/learned every bit of material before you move on. Consequently, it t
akes FOREVER to do anything. It can be almost discouraging at points. You may sa
y to yourself "I want to learn about____ [vector bundles, cohomology]" this term
! 300 pages later and you're still two chapters away from vector bundles, and 15
0 pages away from cohomology. But, if you have the time, the effort, and the wil
lingness to go through everything in detail, then yes, I may admit it is one of
the best texts.
Gathmann's Notes: These are just a good, quick and dirty, set of notes that's su
pposed to cover roughly Chap I, II and III of Hartshorne with a little extra. It
's terse, terser than Hartshorne, but with all the clarity that Hartshorne lacks
. In a lot of ways, Hartshorne is a digested EGA, and Gathmann is a digested Har
tshorne.
Fulton's book (on curves): This is a really, really solid introduction to the su
bject. It really only covers curves, but manages to get to a lot of the hard top
ics (e.g. RR) fairly quickly. If you have time to kill, doing this before you le
arn about varieties in general, and then about schemes, is helpful--it will set
up great intuition for later. Let me warn against "I need to prepare myself for
AG by reading these 6 books". This is a prevalent mentality. One which can cause
you to spend years preparing to actually study what you want to study. Unless y
ou have infinite time (in which case, share) just get to what you want to do.
Bump's Book: This is a super terse, super condensed book just on varieties. It c
ertainly will not give you much geometric background, but will quickly get you i
nto the algebraic side of things. This book is almost more like a commutative al
gebra book where everything is phrased entirely geometrically. This is good thou
gh, since most newcomers to AG really lack the commutative algebra background to
be successful. This is an excellent primer.
Books I did not include: Hartshorne, Liu, Eisenbud and Harris, EGA, amongst othe
rs.
Hartshorne: This is a classic, but really is kind of terrible. It's not the ters
eness, or the fact that most of the important theorems are exercises(this is als
o true of Vakil!), but it's lack of clarity. Some of the proofs in this book are
entirely overcomplicated, and, in fact, wrong-minded. He often times doesn't de
velop the machinery to make a theorem "obvious". For example, Vakil's so long an
d drawn out that by the time you need to prove Big Theorem X, you have seen sooo
o much material, proved sooooo many would-be lemma,s that the theorem is now obv
ious. Hartshorne's more like "Uh...let's just uhm...prove this big thing" and th
en proceeds to give this unmotivated, very sloppy and technically opaque proof.
Not reccomended as a text. It's good to look up some things though. EGA is actua

lly clearer.
Liu: Liu is really, really, really good. Just not as a first time book (or at le
ast not in isolation--it should go along with another more didactic book). The p
roblem is that Liu is technically perfect. In complete opposition to Hartshorne'
s proofs, Liu's proofs are one-hundred percent on the up-and-up. There is no tou
chy-feely "so, you see where to go from here? Right? Ok...end of proof". The man
has a perfect understanding of the technical underpinnings of AG and they are o
n display in his book. He even has some pretty good examples. The only problem i
s that the pace, and in fact the same technical excellence that makes the book g
ood, can be intimidating for a first time through. But, if you want a slick proo
f of something, or are already familiar with AG, Liu is a great book to have.
Eisenbud and Harris: This book is truly excellent as a source of motivation. It
has great pictures, great examples, and great exposition. What it lacks is the t
echnical underpinnings. Like some other books (e.g. Hatcher) you can read a chap
ter in E&H, feel like you "get" everything, but can't do a single problem in Har
tshorne or Liu. This is a great second read, to fill in some missing intuition,
once you understand what's technically going on.
EGA: This isn't quite as bad as people make it out to be. It's much clearer, tha
n say Hartshorne. Grothendieck was actually a very good writer. The downsides fo
r me are that it lacks exposition at some points, it has the perfect amount of g
enerality to bring out the clarity of a theorem (this is something that is often
misunderstood--Grothendieck never proved anything in excessive generality, but
just enough generality where you see that the hypotheses were EXACTLY what you n
eeded--it brings out the real nature of theorem) but more than may be healty for
a first read, and well, it's in French.
I left out a couple other obvious books, but I hope the above is helpful for som
ebody!