Unfortunately, the central premise of the workbook/CD package is inside out. Unlike many texts with accompanying CD, the CD in this set contains the central content of the text, while the book is merely the accompanying workbook material. On the one hand, it's nice to have a workbook for students to write in. But on the other hand, it would be much more effective use of the technology if the students could read the texts in book format and then complete all of the work electronically using software on the CD. In fact, many of the workbook exercises are also presented in Webpage format on the CD, but the vocabulary and review exercises do not appear there, even though they could easily be assessed online. (The answers to the exercises are printed in the back of the workbook.)

A more serious problem is that all of the content text is contained only on the CD. Thus, a student must access the CD in order to read the content materials. The content materials vary widely in quality, from excellent in-depth articles to terse PowerPoint presentations. Some of the content texts are a few pages long, but several run to over 100 pages. Most are not in HTML format, but in Adobe PDF, set to display as very short pages, similar to presentation slide format. Since the content does not appear in the workbook, students will either need to read everything online, or else print hundreds of short pages so that they can read them offline. Students who only have access to computers on campus will have no choice but to print the pages if they want to read them at home. I really like the idea of a CD/text package, but it would far more useful if the text included the content, while the CD focused on the exercises, with built-in automated assessment and editing capabilities.