Rating: Excellent
Strong Points: Easy to navigate the website and the books; wide variety of topics available
Textbooks can be prohibitively expensive, often costing students hundreds of dollars for just a semester’s worth of books. In this dawning age of open-source materials, OpenStax CNX, from Rice University, delivers an alternative to these astronomical prices. OpenStax CNX provides users with free, open-source, and vetted textbooks on a variety of topics, with a particular focus on math and science. The website allows users to browse through or download any of the books available, which include titles such as calculus, biology, and statistics. Although the community feature of the website, where authors can publish and edit textbooks they created, is being retired, the textbooks developed by the OpenStax team will continue to be available and updated. OpenStax CNX is a great website for educators and students who are looking for alternatives to expensive course materials and is great for anyone looking for a convenient way to brush up on old topics.