FJacob

I'm not particularly fond of Fux's book mainly because it represents a conception of music that the contemporary composer usually doesn't have (considering he's interested to compose new material, and not just to emulate the past). If your goal is just to compose some kind of bach/palestrinian counterpoint than fux's work will serve you just fine, but if you just want to learn how to combine different melodic ideas then you might want to try something else. My point lies in the context which Fux's wrote his book. Towards the end of renascence, with the counter-reform and the Trent Council, the Church felt the need to standardize polyphonical music or simply ban it. It was a belief of some priests that masses should only contain monophonical or homophonical music, since counterpoint disturbed the comprehension of the text and the clarity of the musical modes used. This sanctions were not implemented mainly because some composers, specially an Italian called Giovanni da Palestrina, showed in a public performances that counter-punctual melodies could be written while preserving the clarity and the mood of the text. More than 100 years later Fux compiled the rules stated by Palestrina on how to create a proper polyphonical texture and published it as a workbook. While Palestrina's technique is very rich and can be exploited by any serious composer, it only surpassed the others in popularity because it was supported by the Church. However, during the renascence, there were MANY brillant counterpoint composers, who created their works based on different and usually freer rules (Ockeghem, des Prez, Obrecht, Isaac, Willaert, Monteverdi and Gesualdo to name a few) and ignoring their work would be a shame. That being said, IMHO the best way to study counterpoint is not to work through already stated rules in a workbook, that was created in a very specific historical context, but rather to study the history of polyphony and analyse many significant works of different periods. That's the only way to really get a feeling on how the masters of the past worked with modal voices and of course, to figure a way to do it in the present.