The desire for a more matrix oriented linear algebra course expressed by engineers and scientists echos a more general trend in the subject away from the abstract approach. Every teacher of linear algebra knows that students "hit the wall" when the notion of an abstract vector space is introduced. One reason for this is that they are coping simultaneously with two new ideas: the concept of an abstract structure and mastering difficult notions like spanning, independence and linear transformations. Consequently, Nicholson, in Chp. 4, discusses topics like independence in the context of Rn so the students can deal with them without having to cope with the abstract baggage of an n-dimensional space. This has been classroom tested and works very well pedagogically.