The Basic Practice of Statistics, Third Edition

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This is a really good book for the introduction to Statistics. The accompanying CD is very good. IT contains lots of data from the problems in the book so you don't have to key in. My instructor also gave us a lot of homework assignments to be done with Minitab. The CD comes with a free student version of SPSS. You may have to buy Minitab if you intent on using it. But do use its very intutive and powerful. The book also encourages the use of Excel, Minitab and TI 83. I used Voyage 200 and it was very helpful for this course. The comanion website is awesome it contains every thing thats on your CD plus additional applets, quizes to help reinforce the material.

Rating:
Summary: Fun but most students found it difficult to follow
Review: As a student of the Arts and Sciences, it is no secret that getting a competent mathematics professor is like winning the state lotto. Fortunately, for those venturing into statistics, your chances of playing those odds will be of no matter once you've had the help of this well-illustrated text. This book not only guides the student carefully through each statistical method, but the available exercises are solvable, realistic, and relevant to the examples as described. My reason for giving this book a 4 out of 5 is that there are two cases in which the book uses premature examples in the solution of one problem while in another problem, the given answer is not fully explained. All in all, this book could be the answer for any student needing clarification of the terms and principles that are usually abbreviated in the classroom lecture. To those of us left to fend for ourselves, this book provides the core material in understanding and solving statistics as well as the empowerment of comprehending the more complex of problems found on certain exams.

Rating:
Summary: Fun but most students found it difficult to follow
Review: At our college, we tried to use this textbook for a year, and at numerous requests by students and faculty, we have had to select another book for the upcomming year for general introductory statsitics courses. Most students found the layout of the book confusing, as it is very choppy. Instead of writing the formulas, supplimenting theory to explain them, and then giving examples, the author chops these sections and mixes them through out the book. Most students found the book hard to follow. Instructors almost always needed supplimentry material and found the book somewhat challenging to teach from. However, students found the examples to be fascinating and diverse, from measuring measuring glucose in cockroaches' "hindguts" to Mickey Mantel's batting average. Especially with the C.D., it is an excellent suppliment to any textbook to illistrate the real life applicability of statistics to non-mathematics majors, but not helpful in explaining concepts to students in of itself.

Rating:
Summary: A Decent Primer for Statistics
Review: Before you use this book, make sure you understand the author's purpose: "Although the book is elementary in the level of mathematics required and in the statistical procedures presented, it aims to give students both an understanding of the main ideas of statistics and useful skills for working with data" (Preface, pp xiv-xv). The key point here is "elementary in the level of mathematics required." Essentially, this is a math-lite version of statistics. With that in mind, the author did a decent job of passing on a working knowledge of statistics (I'll bet all the math in the book could fit on one 5x8 card). Also, the book has TONS of examples. I'd say that at least half of the text is just the author working through real-world examples. So, if you have trouble understanding the statistical concepts the author is trying to get across, there's sure to be plenty of examples immediately following his explanation to help you work things out.

To add a bit more information to the raw data of these reviews, I've mapped the universe of all possible readers of this book onto a set of x-y axes. Let the x-axis run from "non-Math-types" up through "Math-types." Let they y-axis go from "non-geniuses" up through "geniuses:"

- Quadrant I: genius Math-types might as well not even pick this book up. There's almost no math here, nothing is proven, and the example-to-meat ratio is darn near infinite.

- Quadrant II: genius non-Math-types, like the Quadrant Is, should also skip this book. The application focus will please them, but that example-to-meat ratio I mentioned above will bore them to tears.

- Quadrant III: non-genius non-Math-types (i.e., "normal" people). Normally, I consider this one group. However, this book is probably at too simple a level for most of them. The book essentially starts from the assumption that the reader has never used Excel or a calculator to put numbers into a table and graph them. In this day and age, most people will probably be familiar with this. However, for those who aren't, or for those looking for an easy primer in statistics, this is the book for you. Starting, essentially, from scratch, the author will move you up to an ability to understand and use statistics better than most people on the planet (nothing esoteric, just the core stuff). About the only math you need is basic Algebra.

- Quadrant IV: non-genius Math-types, like the Quadrant Is and Quadrant IIs, should probably avoid this book. There's just not enough math in it to satisfy their learning desires. Plus, since they're Math-types, they will probably already know enough math to make what's in this book redundant.

Overall, this is a decent book (I rate it 4 stars out of 5). The author did a good job matching his material to his chosen audience (a subset of Quadrant IIIs). For anyone on the "genius" or "Math" side of my coordinate system, I highly recommend they AVOID this book. For the majority of the Quadrant III ("normal") people, the lack of almost any math might make the book too simplistic. But, for those with few math skills and little background in number manipulation or graphing, this is a very good start.

Rating:
Summary: Wrong answers, Wrong book
Review: I bought this book because it was required textbook. But if I had a choice of selecting my own textbook, this wouldn't be it. Some of the answers on the back were wrong (after few times, you can't trust the answers or yourself any more), un-updated with newer version, and too short answers to figure out what is the explanation of the outcomes. So I turned to the CDs which came with the book, only to find that the website links are all messed up and needed an instructor's registered email to access any important stuff. --simply useless.
I am usually not very active about giving advice but in this case I had to speak out--Don't buy. I have another advise for you if you are the publisher: revise. third edition doesn't seem to be any better than 2nd.

Rating:
Summary: This book is true to its purposes
Review: I just finnished reading this book and found it to be true to its purposes -- to teach statistic concepts without deep math or theoretical formulae -- exactly as the author states in his preface (read it). IMHO the book is easy to read, contains real world examples, provide easy to follow guidelines and hints, STRONGLY warns about its simplifications, give some advices on experimental design, sampling size, and put statistics as a tool in perspective.

Buy this book if:

1. You already attended an introductory course on statistics and would like to see real world examples including graphics interpretation (boxplots, stem-and-leaf, histograms), inference for means, proportions, linear regression and more. 2. You agree that probability theory is *not* essential/necessary to understand statistics concepts. 3. You are a reseacher in social or medical science and would like to improve your knowledge on inference.

Don't buy this book if:

1. You expect deep probability theory and theorem proofs. 2. You are a seasoned statistic. 3. You haven't attended any introductory course on statistics

Look at these other books:

Using SPSS for Windows: Analyzing and Understanding Data by Samuel B. Green, et alli -- this book is very terse on theory but its ARPA section is worth the whole book -- see other reviews at amazon.com

Spss 8.0 Guide to Data Analysis by Marja J. Norusis -- a good companion to SPSS as well as a good introductory book -- see other reviews at amazon.com

Rating:
Summary: Worthless book good only for fire
Review: Maybe it was because of my college professor, but I could not stand this stuff! Most of it doesn't make sense and isn't really too useful. But there are probably worse math books.

Rating:
Summary: Jumps into things, but uses great examples
Review: My instructor did a decent job explaining things that the book did not make clear. Quite often, the book went from basic to intermediate/advanced without any transition or guide. I've seen several other books with better explanations, but as far as statistical examples are concerned, it's excellent. If you're learning Statistics on your own, you may want to find an easier book to teach you the concept, then use this book to work out the example problems and advance your knowledge.

Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to statistics
Review: This book is a good introduction to statistics and is quite easy to understand with excellent examples, though a few parts of it can get a bit technical. For anyone wishing to learn introductory statistics, I would recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: excellent introductory text for all disiplines
Review: This book provides an excellent formal introduction to statistics for undergraduates in all disciplines. It is the book I would teach out of for such a course. For specialty areas, I would choose a different text. Courses designed for engineers or health science majors should emphasize the techniques that are most commonly used in their discipline and the examples and applications in their discipline should be emphasized. With that said, there are still many introductory courses at universities that would be well served with this as the text.

I am reviewing the first edition published in 1995. Apparently a second edition has just recently been published. As Moore says in his introduction the text is written as "an introduction to statistics for students in two-year and four-year colleges and universities that emphasizes working with data and statistical ideas." He is true to his word. He follows the guidelines of the professional societies (ASA and MAA) which recommend emphasis on statistical thinking, more data and concepts,less theory and fewer recipes in teaching introductory statistics. They also emphasize active learning in the classroom. This book does all three but is more formal than his first book which presented and emphasized concepts very well but was not structured like a traditional course. Although the text can be used for active learning, it does not go all the way toward the currently popular approach of an activity-based course as has been initiated by Velleman and more recently by Moore himself in his activity based text "The Active Practice of Statistics."

Instructors of introductory statistics courses would be well advised to use one of Moore's text or the other text "Statistics" by Freedman et al.