For lower level courses (say calc and below) the books written in the early 1900's for students seem better. Of course there are plenty of stinkers there too, but it seems being able to explain a topic in a clear concise manner with applications was prized more. The text books my kids have in comparison are utter garbage in their effort to present the material in dozens of nonsensical manners to help those that didn't understand the primary methods. Plus "challenge" problems that rely on missing knowledge abound. The perfect example I had of this is when my child was in 3rd grade as part of the homework there was a set of algebraic word problems with multiple variables. When I confronted the teacher, she didn't see anything wrong with teaching a "trick" to solve problems where the underlying math was two or three grade levels ahead (said trick, was so narrow an unwieldy to basically be useless for any kind of problem more complex than ones made up for 3rd graders)...
The bottom line seems to be that the "noise" level keeps increasing to the point where the core fundamental concepts are lost. Which is to bad, because teaching "tricks" which don't clarify the problems, or make them simpler to solve is IMHO just a waste of time.
BTW; For abstract algebra there are a number of "applications" books which teach the core concepts necessarily to understand error correction or whatever. Use those books first, and then read the more traditional text books. The textbooks should be considered more of a reference book than something that should be read from cover to cover. (although that itself is a problem because jumping into the middle isn't easy).
The bottom line seems to be that the "noise" level keeps increasing to the point where the core fundamental concepts are lost. Which is to bad, because teaching "tricks" which don't clarify the problems, or make them simpler to solve is IMHO just a waste of time.
BTW; For abstract algebra there are a number of "applications" books which teach the core concepts necessarily to understand error correction or whatever. Use those books first, and then read the more traditional text books. The textbooks should be considered more of a reference book than something that should be read from cover to cover. (although that itself is a problem because jumping into the middle isn't easy).