For quite a while now i've been woking with a book called "concepts in modern algebra", which teaches a more abstract type of algebra than most high school classes do. However, my teacher told me that newer books are likely to have more updated terms and a better focus, and said he'll bring me one. Also, the more practical branch of my algebra learning was semi-halted at the same tie because I was waiting for my teacher to get some packet for me.
For about two weeks, the teacher has forgot to bring the book. I got the packets from another teacher (and they sucked badly, but that's another story), and worked on that (boring). Meanwhile, I was still waiting for the teacher to bring the more modern book, and learning from my apparantly outdated book. That is, until I started finding mistakes in it, such as the fact that it claims that for every binary operation with an inverse there will be only one inverse per element. while that is prvably true for ascossiative binary operation, the following binary operation shows that it can be wrong:
| a | b | c | |
| a | c | c | a |
| b | c | c | b |
| c | a | b | c |
There was no actual proof in the book, and I decided that maybe it's time to find a new book. after a few more days without the modern abstract book, I decided to ask my teacher for the name in order to see if I could find it in the library, he said that the chances are slim, and referred me to the same other teacher from which I got the specific books. So I went there, and that teacher told me that i'll have to buy the bookmyslef, but at least he gave me some names.
This independent study thing is quite harder than I thought it would be.