This is the easier of Kolman's two texts: it has more applications and vector spaces come later in the text. Major revision. New edition is most technology friendly book in this market. Last chapter is on numerical techniques using MATLAB. Also has superb MATLAB manual by Hill/Zitarelli ('96) that should be sampled to anyone interested in technology.
Reasonable explanations. lots of applications sprinkled through out and many examples - this can be good or bad depending on how terse you like things - the formatting makes it easy to gloss over unneeded examples though.
exercises are good and numerous but only odd solutions are provided (and none for theoretical ones so far ) and many are wrong in the 6th edition I have. Perhaps the newer editions are better about this but it can be irritating.