American Sign Language (ASL), both as the focus of scholarly study and as anincreasingly popular foreign-language option for many secondary and university levelstudents, has made remarkable strides during recent years. With respect to the linguistics ofASL, there has been a veritable revolution in our understanding of the nature, structure, andcomplexity of the language since the publication of William Stokoe's landmarkSign Language Structure in 1960. Works on both theoretical aspects of thelinguistics ofASL and on the sociolinguistics of the Deaf community now abound, and the overall quality ofsuch works is impressively high. Also widely available now are textbooks designed to teachASL as a second language. Such textbooks vary dramatically in quality, ranging fromphrasebook and lexical guides to very thorough and up-to-date works focusing oncommunicative competence in ASL.