That said, I rarely follow a text when I teach (mostly grad classes), because the material I teach has not been put into good books. I do provide reading assignments for those who would prefer to get the material that way.

For math, the key learning happens by solving problems using the methods. A text is great for providing a source of well-crafted problems of graduated difficulty (now, if only the math text writers actually did that!). At the elementary-school level, the Singapore Primary Math series actually does an excellent job of providing that sort of graduated exercise, as well as supplementary books with intensive practice and challenging problems, for those who need more. At the high-school level, the Art of Problem-Solving texts have some of the best problem sets I’ve seen.

I’ve mulled this over for awhile, and I think the only type of textbook that I’d “cling to” or “cherish” would be a text that I’d written- and that would probably only be because of the royalties.

I guess I just can’t envision a single text that would be appropriate to use every day for an entire semester. I’m thinking more of science texts (my speciality) here, where generally the questions and problems in the book are simply insufficient to get at the real meat of the content.

If I was forced hired to write a high school science textbook, it would be written in simple English, rely heavily on analogies, include only basic overviews of the content, and have a hefty list of resources (websites, non-fiction books, videos, etc.) for each section for when you need to go into more detail.

However, I don’t what I’ve described is best suited by a physical textbook. It sounds much more like an online document.

@Dan – As far as a “seasoned veteran” textbook, I think that’s a good question. Probably none of the ones sitting around, or maybe any of the books sitting around just as a bunch of bound problem sets. The bigger question of presenting the material and exploring it seems like something folks come up with on their own to avoid totally artificial, why-are-we-learning-this inducing content.