Steve pointed out the thing that makes EGA difficult to read is not that it is dense, but rather that it is gigantic.

Robin Hartshorne’s book algebraic geometry is an edulcorated version of Grothendieck and Dieudonné’s EGA, which changed algebraic geometry forever.

EGA was so notoriously difficult that essentially nobody outside of Grothendieck’s first circle(roughly those who attended his seminars) could (or wanted to) understand it, not even luminaries like Weil or Néron .

Things began to change with the appearance of Mumford’s mimeographed notes in the 1960’s, the celebrated Red Book, which allowed the man in the street(well, at least the streets near Harvard) to be introduced to scheme theory.

Then, in 1977, Hartshorne’s revolutionary textbook  algebraic geometry was published. With it one could really study scheme theory systematically, in a splendid textbook, chock-full of pictures, motivation, exercises and technical tools like sheaves and their cohomology.

However the book remains quite difficult and is not suitable for a first contact with algebraic geometry: its Chapter I is a sort of reminder of the classical vision but you should first acquaint yourself with that material in another book.

GTM 52 的精华是第 2, 3章, 分别介绍 Scheme 和它上面的 Cohomollogy theory.

GTM 52 有习题 464 道. 这本书的习题, 非常重要! 当然, 习题也不一定必须一个一个全部做完.