Textbooks

The text for this course is Rings, Fields, Vector Spaces, and Group Theory : An Introduction to Abstract Algebra via Geometric Constructibility by B. A. Sethuraman. The link above is to amazon.com; the book is also available in the UMass bookstore.

I also expect to work from What is Mathematics, a classic book (not a textbook) by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins. That's one of the books that turned me on to mathematics when I was in high school. It's been reissued (the link above is to the latest version, edited by Ian Stewart) but I'm fonder of the older editions. There are three pages of used copies available at albris.com, ranging in price from $7.44 to $152.30. If you don't already own this book you should. If there's a hard copy version that looks attractive go for it.