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Sun's Scott McNealy cared - he cared a lot.

SAM (Skills Assessment Manager) is the premier proficiency-based assessment and training environment for Microsoft® Office. If this is the same SAM, it is a site for taking online courses in Microsoft Office

This semester, my accounting professor is requiring us to get WebTutor on Blackboard. Luckily I took the course last semester, realized that WebTutor doesn't really add to the course (over the book), and I'm skipping it this semester. Hopefully the professor won't kick me out because I don't have it.

I've never seen an undergraduate textbook that costs more than $200.

Then you haven't been looking, or are full of shit (most likely both).
Here's a standard undergrad calculus book which lists for more than $200.
Here's a standard undergrad chemistry book which lists for more than $200.

And there are plenty more. This is pretty typical for the big "service" courses for freshman/sophomores in college. It doesn't matter if a student is lucky enough to find a cheap copy somewhere; the fact is that the publishers are ripping off students with expensive new editions that add little to no value over previous editions, at outrageous list prices (often the same price at campus bookstores).

When I was in high school we had a comprehensive Office 2003 textbook that covered MOUS objectives for each of the core office applications. That textbook was published by Thompson Course Technologies. Im not sure if they have been bought out or changed in that time, but I found a Cengage textbook that covers the material for 2010. The book I studied from explained a particular concept, applied that concept, and reviewed that concept. Every few concepts was followed by a test. My instructor followed the method provided by the book, and it worked well.

Use a similar approach with programming. Find a suitable starting language and find a book that follows the concept-tutorial method. To make things a bit more challenging in this area my instructor gave us custom projects that went outside the scope of the objective text, but still relied on lessons we had learned

> ...when you have Search? Pick your own keywords.

Unfortunately there are some major problems with searching, such as ``A OR B'' returning fewer results than when searching separately for A, B.

http://www.gale.cengage.com/reference/peter/googlebooks.htm