Intro Stats

Rating:
Summary: Good stuff!
Review: This actually is a fantastic textbook.

De Veaux and Velleman are realists; they know that you don't want to read everything. They have taken the liberty of highlighting important parts of their explanations. (They also highlighted a bit of advice recommending that students read more than just the highlighted text-they have a good sense of humor that shows up throughout the book.) The authors also provide a fantastic summary of "Key Concepts" at the end of each chapter.

Also, they have clearly gone to great lengths to find interesting topics to use in their exercises. There are very few mind numbing homework problems. You know the type: "In the following data about the most frequently purchased brand of toenail clippers..."
How about a question like this: What is the likelihood that reading a randomly selected example question will be more painful that attempting to swallow the textbook it came from? If you're selecting from Intro Stats, put down your fork and knife, because De Veaux and Velleman have gathered some topics that I think most people will genuinely find interesting. Such topics include: drug use among teenagers, stance on the death penalty, changes in average marriage age, and many others.

I've never felt compelled to review a textbook before, but this one is worth it. It's good stuff, my friends. Good stuff!

Rating:
Summary: (Almost) Math-less Stats
Review: This is a well-organized, nicely put-together textbook, with lots of step-by-step examples to give you a good base of understanding and lots of problems and section reviews to allow you to apply and extend that understanding. If you're intimidated by math, this textbook will go a long way toward easing your fears, and if you're a lover of math, you'll learn a lot about Statistics and be highly entertained along the way.
Although an introductory calculus class was a prerequisite for the course I took using this text, the only time integrals and complicated formulas showed up was in footnotes or the occasional homework problem. In general, the book aims to teach through real world examples and applications, not through pages of potentially intimidating to-be-memorized equations and formulas. As a result, the "math" parts of the book (you can't really do Statistics without math) are hidden, so that you are often using "math" without realizing it.
I especially liked the book's listing of instructions, for a variety of Statistics software packages, about how to do on the computer whatever you'd just learnt in a chapter. There are some "do by hand" problems, but just as many "use the computer" problems--helpful, given that any time most of us will be using Statistics again will be for a job or for research and will involve computer software.
There are all sorts of random facts that break up the practically inevitable "ugh" feeling of reading a textbook. In addition, the writing is very clear and informal, without lots of technical jargon (what little there is is clearly explained first--no wondering in Chapter 15 what that darned "r," which you've been seeing since Chapter 6, means). When reading, I always felt the authors were talking to me through the page, which made reading go faster and more pleasantly. (The short chapters help, too.)
I also found the "What can go wrong?" sections at the end of each chapter useful, especially when we got to interpreting data: several times, I would try to do a homework problem, then go back to the chapter and realize I'd made a beginner's mistake and done exactly what I wasn't supposed to do. The authors know what first-time Statistics students are thinking, and they do a good job of steering you along the right course.