Can someone help me understand the inner product?
The axioms of the inner product are
1. 
2. 
3.  \equiv \langle V|aW+bZ\rangle = a\langle V|W \rangle +b\langle V|Z \rangle)
Given that
and
can be expressed in terms of their basis vectors,


How can the axioms be used to obtain:

thanks
I don't really like your notation!
An inner product is an expression that obey's the following axioms:
say I have three vectors
 \because \textbf{u,v,w} \in V (\textit{where V is a vector space}) and \alpha \in \mathbb{R})
1)

2)

3)

4)
a)

b)

The most simple inner product that is seen (when you do specialist maths) is the "dot product".
Anyway this is the notation that is used in linear algebra, as for your notations I have yet to see them.
You can use the inner product to do all the same things you do with the dot product,
i.e.

angle

between
u and
v is,

Please keep in mind that these are angles and norm's with respect to the given inner product and they will not yield the same results as the dot product if the inner product used isn't the dot product.
You could try proving that:
if

prove that,

is an inner product.