ABSTRACT
Textbooks provide opinions about topic coverage for a course; they represent the authors’ views of what is most important about an area. Quite clearly, different authors’ conceptions of a topic will vary in their similarity to any instructor’s ideas about a course. In planning a course, you can read textbooks to inform and modify your own views about what the course should cover. But the most important textbook-task for an instructor is choosing (one or more) textbooks that the students will be required to read. In selecting textbooks, instructors take large steps toward defining what their course will be like. It is therefore important to choose textbooks that are compatible with your view of the subject matter.
