After struggling with classics in the field like Dummit &amp; Foote and Rotman's books on the topic, Pinter's book was welcome relief. Previously, I've always found the writing in these other books to be too dense and I would quickly lose motivation to study them. However, the exposition in Pinter's book is very clear; he starts with basic properties of groups and subgroups, and gradually ramps up to cover the big theorems of group theory and a bit of galois theory. The main text covers the most important ideas, with an emphasis on building your intuition before diving into a formal proof. Then, at the end of the chapter there is an abundance of exercises that delve into more specific applications and consequences, you can feel free to pick and choose at your discretion. This is by far my favorite book for self studying modern algebra.