Reviews Wanted

Reviews Wanted

How do you search for the right textbook for your course? Do you just look at the books that publishers’ representatives bring around? Do you wander around to each publisher’s booth at the Joint Meetings? Do you type in ’abstract algebra textsâ? at Amazon.com? Do you wish there were an easy way to find out whether particular texts would be appropriate for your students?

The MAA wants to help you. We now have online a Catalog of Commercial Materials as part of MathDL, the Mathematical Sciences Digital Library. You can access the Catalog through a link from MAA Online or go to it directly at http://www.mathdl.org/lcp.html. There you will find a listing of most textbooks available for any given course. Each textbook has a link to the publisher’s home page, where you will find a description (written by the publisher’s marketing department) and where you can order an examination copy. Unfortunately, although there is also a link to ’user reviewsâ?, reviews are not yet available for most books posted.

So to make this Catalog useful to all of us, we need your help in writing reviews. If you have taught from any of the books listed in the Catalog in the past few years?or are teaching from one of them this semester?please consider writing a brief review on the form below.

Tell everyone the strengths and weaknesses of the book, the responses of your students, and whether you plan to use the book again. We will then post the review online so that others can access it. Even if your textbook is not listed in the Catalog, you can still write a review. In that case, we can add the book to the Catalog and will get a link to the publisher.

With your help, the Catalog of Commercial Materials will become a valuable resource for all of us and will help us immensely in choosing a book that meets our students’ needs.

Review form