**By Lew Ludwig** Image generated using Gemini, with prompts created by ChatGPT. I am always amazed by the authors of textbooks. They take years of expertise and distill it into something meaningful for the rest of us and our students. I know that for many of them, the process started in exactly the same place I find myself: not having the perfect textbook. So they develop their own notes, refine them, develop them further, refine again, until eventually they have a textbook they share with publishers and the rest of us. I am grateful for all their work. But just as those authors couldn’t find the perfect textbook for themselves, I’ve yet to find one for my Linear Algebra and Differential Equations course. Over fifteen years of teaching it, I’ve used no fewer than six different texts. Ironically, the first text I tried and abandoned is the one I’m currently using. It turns out I wasn’t ready for it the first time through.…