The purpose of the paper is to develop recommendations for the textbooks' creation on social and humanitarian disciplines for university students. The study involves 300 teachers, 300 students, who express their requirements for the content and structure of textbooks, participate in the creation of the project of the textbook and its assessment. The main results of the study are to identify the textbook's functions (informational, transformational, systematizing, organizational and procedural, fixing and selfcontrolling, self-educational, scientific -research, integrating, coordinating, and social), to define current requirements for the structure and content of the textbook, criteria for assessing of its quality (relevance, content availability, optimality and versatility of structure, reliability). The significance of the results obtained is that the proposed content of the textbook integrates fundamental, subject and professional knowledge; the developed structure of the textbook is a systematic alternation of the texts, illustrations, apparatus to organize the mastering of knowledge (questions, assignments, examples, tasks, summarizing tables, conclusions).