Probability : Theory and Examples (Duxbury Advanced Series)

Rating:
Summary: good reference, dont try learning prob theory from it alone
Review: As a reference text for people whove studied the material in it before, its extremely well written. However if youre trying to learn the stuff from scratch you must have another book, one that explains to you whats going on.

Rating:
Summary: the worst probability book ever
Review: I agree with all those who rated this book below or equal to 2 stars.
I don't agree with the author.

His book is only good as a reference book for those who have mastered the contents( for example, the professors who have taught probability for their entire lives and take for granted that every line in the book is trivial. If it is indeed trivial, why bother to write a book! what is a textbook for?)

For my own experience, to follow this book, I have to read everything from Billingsley's textbook!

Rating:
Summary: Poor books
Review: I completely agree with the readers from Madison(Wisconsin) and (Chicago), I don't agree with the author.

Rating:
Summary: the worst probability book ever
Review: I had this book for my probability class and it was just horrible. I ended up purchasing additional probability books so that I would see what is actually going on. The book is very compact and terse, horrible to read. Organization is just awful, there are lots of things all over the place.
I really would not recommend this book for probability course, especially since there are so many better ones like Bilingsley, Resnick, and Chung.

Rating:
Summary: Special style, good choice of material
Review: I used the book as one of the main sources for a two semester course in probability. Besides its special style, which you may or may not like (I do), it covers a wide range of modern topics and is thus one of the best books in probability for graduate students (and researchers :-) ).

Rating:
Summary: The Author Speaks
Review: Probability:Theory and Examples is written for a graduate course in probability. It is not designed for undergraduates or others who are learning the material for the first time. At the graduate level it has been very successful and is one of the mostly commonly used texts in the country. A third edition with more typos corrected and hopefully a lower price will come in roughly October 2003.

Rating:
Summary: Confusing ...
Review: The book has a nice collection of topics, perhaps the nicest and most modern one out of the usual textbooks out there. Unfortunately, it is poorly written. The proofs of theorems are extremely unclear, even after thinking about them for some time. Furthermore, the notation is not standard and since not all of it is in the nice list at the end, I find myself often looking through the book for an explanation of some piece of notation.

My experience is with the brand new third edition. It seems that the only changes are correction of errors, cheaper price and some minor correnctions. However, I still found some errors after a short inspection and also some that I suspect, but not sure that are errors.

My advice is do not be tempted by the nice modern table of contents and by the late publication date (2005 for the third edition). I guess we have to stick to the other older texts on the topic. I strongly recommend Williams' Probability with Martingales or Ash's second edition Probability and Measure over this book.

Rating:
Summary: Poor organization spoils this book
Review: There aren't many graduate-level books on Probability Theory out there. Durrett's entry into the field suffers from some incomprehensible organizational choices. First, while theorems are labeled in "(Chapter.Theorem)" format, they are rarely given names, and are always referred to using "(Chapter.Theorem)" notation. For example, the second theorem in the Chapter 4 would be referred to later in the text as "(4.2)". This is fairly useless to anyone who has not memorized the entire book, as we must page back to Chapter 4 to find out what "4.2" refers to. Furthermore, Durrett adopts the convention of only numbering theorems and other important results, so referring to a past equation or calculation can be vague at times.

Second, his proofs often refer to results proved in previous exercises. Mathematical convention, as I understand it, dictates that any result you intend to refer back to later in the text should be declared in the main text in some form---as a theorem, a lemma, or a proposition. If these results are so important, Durrett should have listed them in the exposition as propositions. This way readers who are not working all the problems can still follow the proofs in the text. The proofs to the propositions in question could still be left to the exercises.

Third, on the same note as my second point, the exercises (as solved in the solutions manual) often require the use of previous exercises. Again, if you have not been working all the problems up to this point you will be sunk.

Finally, there is no way to judge the difficulty of the exercises. There are some problems in the book that you can easily spend hours racking your brain on with no progress. There is nothing in the text to distinguish such problems as extraordinarily difficult. Furthermore, when you give up and consult the solution manual, you see the solution involves (1) five exercises from previous chapters(!) and (2) an idea you would never have come up with unless you could read Durrett's mind. For such problems it would be helpful to have a hint, or at least a warning...

Overall, I would not recommend this book as a first text in Probability Theory. I've found Billingsley's text and Shorack's text much more readable. Durrett's book just isn't worth the exorbitant price Brooks/Cole/Wadsworth/Duxbury is asking. You are better off checking it out from your local library.