Amazon.com description: Product Description: This revision of Algebra for College Students continues the 30-year Lial/Hornsby tradition of excellence and reflects their ongoing commitment to helping instructors teach and students succeed. Featuring the best possible text and supplements package using the most up-to-date instructional strategies, the text provides a flexible table of contents that can be adapted for a variety of course structures. While topics traditional to intermediate algebra are treated thoroughly in the early chapters, the text also includes in-depth coverage of "true" college algebra topics. New to this edition and consistent with current teaching practices is the early introduction of graphing lines in a rectangular coordinate system and functions in Chapter 3. This organization provides students with increased exposure to basic graphing and function concepts, an integral part of later mathematics courses, as they study polynomial, rational, and radical expressions in Chapters 4-6. Chapters 8-10 then provide comprehensive coverage of additional graphing and function topics. Consistent with this approach, interesting applications featuring real world data in the form of ordered pairs, tables, bar and line graphs, and equations have been incorporated throughout the text.If you choose not to cover graphing linear equations and functions earlier as the new edition suggests, you can defer Chapter 3 and cover it before Chapter 8 as in the previous edition. Section 4.3 and the material on graphing and functions in Sections 5.1, 5.4, 5.6, and 6.5 can easily be delayed or omitted.