[yorwba]

Have you tried teaching without any textbook at all? Because that's how it worked during my CS education in Germany. All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. Sometimes there were also optional recommendations for further reading, but I recall one memorable case where a student asked the prof to recommend a textbook, who wasn't able to give an answer on the spot because his course wasn't designed around any particular book.

If you think that writing down everything you want to teach sounds like a lot of work, well, that's how you benefit from relying on a textbook to supply the content for you instead.

EDIT: Perhaps I should've read TFA first, considering that it describes a textbook grown out of the author's lecture notes for a course taught without textbook.

[WalterBright]

At Caltech, a textbook was often specified by the Prof, but was rarely referenced or used.

> All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes.

I discovered (and others have confirmed) that handouts of lecture notes are not very effective. What is effective is the prof writes them on the chalkboard and the student copies them, by hand, into a notebook.

Labor saving machinery doesn't work when trying to learn a subject.

[yorwba]

Taking notes during a lecture is a neat trick to force the content to stay in short-term memory for at least a little while. But that also comes with the risk of transmission errors. Instructor-provided lecture notes can serve as a canonical reference. As long as you don't treat them as a labor-saving device, but instead as an error-correcting mechanism, they're helpful.

[jrm4]

I've taught about 10 or 12 different courses. I only have one course in which I require a textbook, and it can be found for about 20 bucks.