Groups and Representations: 162 (Graduate Texts in Mathematics)

I used this book as a 2nd year grad student with a little more than a year of graduate algebra. It worked very well as tool to solidifying my knowledge of group theory. i think it would also work as a great book to read while taking a first year algebra course. The idea of the book is to teach theory grounded in examples. In particular, Alperin uses the matrix groups as the main example for the entire book. The writing is very user friendly and the proofs are adequate. It covers basic group theory concepts, local structure (p-groups, Sylow, solvability), Parabolic Subgroups of Gl(n,F) and at the end goes into modules and representation theory.