Introduction to Probability and Statistics (with InfoTrac and CD-ROM)

Rating:
Summary: An "easy" introduction but lacks content
Review: Author: Computer Science/Mathematics Undergraduate at Cameron University

This book was required for an introductory non-calculus based statistics course at my school and it turned out to be a mixed bag. The theories are explained well in most cases but the book doesn't have enough examples for all of the theorems. Many times only one case is explained in dynamic situations leaving this reader more than a little lost. Usually the theorems are explained well enough that this is not a big deal, but not so in every case. So there tends to be those points where the student may get a little stuck without assistance from their professor.

Another problem I found was that the book was a little bit dumbed down in many areas. This book uses no calculus, so the theories are presented often without the mathematical rigor required to properly formulate accurate results. The book still presents the theorems and formulas in a way where the student can get something out of this without calculus, but it becomes a problem later in the book in the sections on regression. For a non-calculus based class like the one I took, this is all unavoidable, so the book handled the situation well considering the constraints.

This book presents a very light introduction to statistics and is good prep for more advanced statistics courses, but as a stand-alone only the most basic material is presented since it is non-calculus based and the material is spread thin between combinatorics, probability, binomial distributions, normal distributions, t distributions, ANOVA tests, regression, non-parametric statistics, etc... To attain a significant amount of useful knowledge you really need to buy separate books tackling each of these subjects independantly, so this book is really unneccessary even for an introductory text but might serve well the student who needs to be eased into statistics lightly or just wants a brief overview of the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Very poorly written.
Review: I had to buy this book for an introductory graduate stats class. This book assumes you have some knowledge of stats and so provides very brief explanations for most concepts. This is a big problem for students with little or no stats background.

Another problem is that there are too few examples. Considering their meager explanations, one would hope they would at least provide enough examples to help students understand the concepts. But they usually provide only one or two problems, which are woefully inadequate.

Also, the CD is totally useless. Most of the practice is multiple choice, which I think is pretty silly for a stats class. In addition, there is no explanation for how they got to the answer, so if you can't figure it out and choose the wrong answer, you're out of luck for any explanation.

I stopped using this book for my course and instead began using Elementary Statistics, A Step by Step Approach by Bluman. This book is excellent; it explains everything from step 1. There are also many, many examples and lots of pictures to help you further understand stats. Also, they explain very clearly when you should use the different formulas, which I found extremely helpful in bringing all the concepts together.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The text we used for our undergrad Stats class covered the exact same material as this text, which we used for a graduate level class and which cost about 60 bucks more, but the undergrad text was written more clearly, concisely and logically. We even found a mistake in one of the tables in the back of this book.