Unlike most books of this type, the book has been organized into -lessons- rather than chapters. This has been done to limit the size of the mathematical morsels that students must digest during each class, and to make it easier for instructors to budget class time. The book contains considerably more material than normally appears in a first course. For example, several advanced topics such as the Jordan canonical form and matrix power series have been included. This was done to make the book more flexible than most books presently available, and to allow instructors to choose enrichment...