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Rating: 
Summary: The best introductory probablity book for a serious reader
Review: It is amazing that a 148 page book can cover so much with such clarity. Even more amazing is the way it covers all basics, going from combinatorial problems to limit theorems in the first half, with a measure of relevant examples and a good selection of problems. It makes an equally excellent choice of "additional topics": Markov chains and processes, information theory, game theory, branching processes, and optimal control.This book is not for everyone, as it does require a small degree of mathematical sophistication. But it will prove most useful for a very large audience. For serious beginning mathematics and science students it will provide the quickest way to learn the subject. For lecturers devising an introductory probability course it will make an excellent textbook. And, most importantly, for mathematicians and scientists of all kinds it will serve as an indispensable concise reference book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book
Review: Nice cute book. I really liked the exposition of chebychev inequality, which is in many other books proved though markov's inequality in a rather inelegant way. Some typos and not too clear exercises. Still highly recommended, specially in view of it's price.
Rating: 
Summary: not a good first book on probability
Review: The problem with this book is that there is no way you can understand the later chapters based on the earlier chapters. This is a more like the survey of the important topics in probability and stochastic processes. There are appendices on information theory, game theory, and branching processes. The book includes basic concepts of probability, random variables, and Markov chains. Feller has a better introductory book on probability.
Rating:
Summary: not a good first book on probability
Review: The problem with this book is that there is no way you can understand the later chapters based on the earlier chapters. This is a more like the survey of the important topics in probability and stochastic processes. There are appendices on information theory, game theory, and branching processes. The book includes basic concepts of probability, random variables, and Markov chains. Feller has a better introductory book on probability.
Rating: 
Summary: How could you recommend this book?
Review: This book is translated from Russian and it might be more understandable if they left it in the original language. This book is the required text for a university probability class I am taking. I can not imagine any text being worse. Almost everyone in the class has bought the Schuam's outline title Probabilty by Lipschutz and Lipson. We are using it to try to decode this text. The exercises in the book are vague and often completely void of even the slightest hint of how to solve them. What is much worse is that there are many very basic and important facts completely left out (A good example is the conditional probability multiplication theorem for dependent events which is only noted in an exercise). I also should note with some reserve, for I know all mathematics texts are problematic in this area, that the notation used is often very difficult to follow (Example: Sumation notation without a simple case explanation beforehand). There is just enough left out of this book to get you confused and frustrated. The only good thing I can say about this book is that is it not very expensive but I strongly believe you can find a better text even at this price.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Pocket Reference
Review: This is not meant as an introductory text--rather, it's a very handy reference for major concepts needed in probability and stochastic calculus. It was one of the few places where I could find a proof of the DeMoivre-Laplace theorem. The examples are also very good--they touch upon basic problems in the field without being overly trivial.
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