• Amazon.com sells an excellent book, Ballroom Dancing, by author of the Standard Syllabus book and president of ISTD Alex Moore, it also has step diagrams, which the Standard Syllabus book doesn't have. Shipping is low ($4 for the first item, $1 additional items). It covers all 5 Standard dances.
• The best price we've found on the Latin Syllabus books is at "ballroomdancers.com," where they are $20 per book + $5 S/H (less per book if more than one ordered; for example, $9.50 S/H total for four books). Click on any link below, then click on "BOOK STORE," then scroll down to find the following Latin syllabus technique books:
  • ISTD Latin American Cha Cha Technique
  • ISTD Latin American Rumba Technique
  • ISTD Latin American Samba Technique
  • ISTD Latin American Jive Technique
  • ISTD Latin American Paso Doble Technique
• You can pay a lot more, but a number of sites have essentially the same price (including shipping) as the official US-ISTD (United States Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing) site for the Standard Syllabus book, which is entitled: The Ballroom Technique. They also recommend Ballroom Dancing, (mentioned above), as a complementary "perfect companion" volume (by the same author), but it's a lot easier to get it from Amazon.com (and I personally use just this book; one advantage it has over the The Ballroom Technique is that Ballroom Dancing has foot diagrams. Unfortunately, Amazon.com doesn't sell the syllabus books at present. To buy books from the US-ISTD site, click on "Dance Books" on the left, then on "Manuals" on the right; you'll also have to print out and mail in their order form with a check (no credit cards). Shipping is low ($4-$7, depending on the dollar value of the order).

DVD/Videos and online video clips:

• BallroomDancers.com sells videos (we haven't compared prices), but the real attraction of this site is the free instructional online video clips, which include some basic figures in most dances in the "Learn the Dances" section of their Learning Center, which also includes an intermediate or advanced Variation of the Week. There is also a "Learning Center" which covers important basics.
• DanceVision.com also sells videos and other media, some of which we know are very well done (we've seen some instructional dance videos that we thought were awful). Many of these allow you to see a sample in a video clip. This is true for instructional videos as well as for videos of competitions & shows, where we found four video clips of up to three minutes each.
• BallroomVideoNews.com [sometimes unavailable] has video clips of recent pro competitions. They are long, and the large versions are very large (640x480 pixels--about 100 MB each).

Other Off-site Resources:

• The University of Maryland, College Park Ballroom Dance Club: BAM (Ballroom at Maryland).
• Other Local Universities:
  • Georgetown University Ballroom Dance Team
  • George Washington University Ballroom Dance Society
  • UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) Ballroom Dance Club
  • CUA (Catholic University of America) Ballroom
  [sometimes temporarily here.]