TITLE: Does category theory help understanding abstract algebra?
QUESTION [15 upvotes]: I'm studying category theory now as a "scientific initiation" (a program in Brazil where you study some subjects not commonly seen by a undergrad), but as I've never studied abstract algebra before, so it's hard to understand most examples and to actually do most of the exercises. (I'm using Mac Lane's Categories for the Working Mathematician and Pareigis Categories and functors.)
To solve this, my advisor recommended me to get S. Lang's Algebra as a reference, but I don't know if that's the most appropriate book and if it's better to get Lang and study algebra through category theory or to study (with a different book and approach, maybe Fraleigh) algebra and then category theory.
PS: I'll have to study by myself (with my advisor's help), as I can't enroll in the abstract algebra course without arithmetic number theory.

REPLY [9 votes]: There is the book Algebra: Chapter 0 by Paolo Aluffi that might fit your needs.
It is a textbook on algebra (as the title says), but it uses the language of category theory from the beginning. Category theory is mostly used to motivate definitions using universality properties.
It is only in the last two chapters that the author introduces more advanced concepts from category theory (functors, abelian categories, etc.).