Stochastic Processes

Rating:
Summary: The topics are interesting.
Review: However, this book is not appropriate as a text book.
Usually, textbooks help to illustrate and develop the concepts you overview in class.
This book, however, is just the opposite. It is a book that will take considerable time for a graduate student to read on her own.
However, if you are taking a class, you will most likely find it useful if you can ask questions to your professor, which will make it possible to read it in a reasonable time.
Some classmates and I agreed this book seems to have been written in a too concise style with the purpose that the avid to learn student has to buy "Introduction to Probability Models" by Ross as well.

Rating:
Summary: Work the exercises in this book , and read elsewhere
Review: I found the exercises quite challenging and some, once you've solved for the solution, were very intuitive. Some were difficult (I spent 2-3 days to think about each of them), some were quite straightforward (less than 1 hour for each). If you want to learn stuff from this book, you got to solve the problems! Mind you, I believe if you want to learn mathematics, you need to solve problems.

Besides the exercises, I don't think this book can live up for the cost. This book was used in a course I took. I thought about buying it for a week, but I finally didn't. Instead, I went to the library and solved the exercises. There are better references out there at this level (Hoel&Port&Stone, Feller, for instance), with same or less price.

Rating:
Summary: So expensive,
Review: I had to bought the book for a course. At the end, I felt that
the author wrote the book just by stacking up results. Except
for a some good exercises, I absolutely do not recommend the
book. If you look at Feller's or Karlin's book, you will see
the difference.

Rating:
Summary: Lucid explanations, treasure-trove of results
Review: I have found this book to be a fantastic resource for practitioners (including myself and colleagues) who need to find known results and/or develop new ones by applying clear probabilistic (especially, sample-path) thinking to new problems. To learn the material and frameworks for the first time, it is perhaps still impossible to beat Feller. (Grimmett and Stirzaker is a great introduction in the same tradition and friendlier than Ross.) But once one has been out in the real world doing applied stochastic modeling fro a while, this book of Ross's becomes extremely valuable! It has many results in it that are difficult or impossible to find elsewhere and that are pretty easy to locate here. Moreover, the proofs are explained very clearly, though briefly, so that if it has been a while since you have had to do problems sets, the style of thinking will come back in a hurry on reading Ross's exposition. Finally, in contrast to some other good books (like Hoel et al.), Ross's notation tends to be very clear and intuitive -- very close to what many authors choose in their journal articles -- so that one can immediately follow a particular result and exposition without having to read through a lot of the rest of the book to understand the notation. This is a real benefit for folks who just want to find and use what is known to help solve some new problems.

In summary, I agree with others that this may not be the right book to learn stochastic processes from for the first time, but it is well worth the (huge) price when you need an up-to-date, clearly explained source to help you solve real-world problems.

Rating:
Summary: Good book but problems too difficult
Review: If you want to enjoy learning renewal and markov processes and other stochastic processes, this book will help you to do just that. To use this book, you need the book called Introduction to probability models by Ross also. Without it, you will never solve even a single problem from this book.

The material is well organised but quite often you have to study several times to understand some concepts. Use it at advanced undergraduate or graduate level. As a beginner, forget it!. You may need a professor in applied probability to assist you in solving some problems.