William Men

Introduction to Probability and Statistics with CD-ROM

1 stars (Very poorly written.) - 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. 2 stars (Disappointing) - 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. 2 stars (An "easy" introduction but lacks content) - 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...
Duxbury Press :: Mathematics & Statistics :: Science&Mathematics :: Probability & Statistics - General :: Mathematics :: Barbara M Beaver :: Robert J Beaver :: William Men :: Introduction to Probability and Statistics (with CD-ROM)