Customer Reviews

Biostatistics: The Bare Essentials, 3e

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book explains statistics in an entertaining way, altough, you must need to know some math to understand it better, the way the authors write is funny and is good for learning and teaching at the same time.

This book is a rare perl in a field known for its dryness and impenetrability. Not only is it short, very practical and very understandable, it is also one of few statistical titles where you will find yourself laughing out loud every few pages. Amazing and delightful!

I did learn some statistics from this book, but I found Rosner's Fundamentals of Biostatistics to be more useful and easier to understand.

Pros:

- They do a decent job of explaining some difficult concepts

Cons:

- If you don't like textbooks that try to liven-up dry subject matter with humor, then you will hate this book. These guys go overboard.

- The humor is mostly crude and I found it distracting more than anything.

- Often times they will introduce a formula, then give no example of it being used. Rosner does a good job of following up formulas and concepts with well written examples.

- I often spent a lot of time trying to grasp a topic in this book, only to find, when I opened up Rosner, I could figure it out quickly.

- Lots of unnecessary writing (mostly related to their attempts at humor)

Intuitive Biostatistics by Motolsky is also good if you are only interested in learning broad concepts. It does not delve into the math.

The authors describe stats in a very humorous and unique way keeping my attention as I read through what is a potentially very dry subject. Some examples are using z-score test to see if a product such as "mangro" is statistically significant in growing you know what and using ANOVA to compare various condom brands to see if anything is statistically significant. The authors have some sort of sick humor, but it gets the point across and keeps me up as I read it. My only negative about the book is I would like to have more example problems in the back that I could work out. There are some at the end of every chapter, but only about 5. To really get some of these complex statistical tests down, I felt I needed a bigger variety of tests.

There is as much bad comedy in this book as there is teaching about statistics. Many of the jokes are in poor taste -- chapters revolving entirely around examples about penis size and condom type, for example. If they were truly funny that would be one thing, but really it is just distracting. If the statistics were taught in a clear way that might redeem the book, but unfortunately that is not the case either. It is extremely convoluted, presenting explanations of things one wouldn't possibly need to know unless you were an advanced statistician, which leaves the reader confused and frustrated (which leads him/her to write negative reviews on Amazon).

It seems that the authors are really trying hard to make a "reader friendly" statistics book. It's a good effort, but ultimately fails.

The authors of this book say the are trying to make statistics fun and easy to understand. I don't think they achieve either of their goals. The jokes, mostly in the sidenotes, are interspersed with some real information. If you don't like the jokes (and they are really not funny), you miss some of the other information that may be helpful. As for the goal of making statistics easy to understand, they fail on this account too. They really haven't come up with a new way to present the information. Laying out the same information with a few bad jokes interspersed really just makes the book unreadable.

As usual the order process and service through Amazon is exceptional. I have strongly recommended to my granddaughters. One is a junior at Rutgers who started using Amazon this semester and a freshman at AB Tech in Asheville, who I haven't convinced yet. I am a grad student in Sports Medicine and found that I needed to do a number of labs in SPSS and it would have made life much easier to have the software at home during the course. I would recommend students who have to use SPSS for labs buy the version with SPSS included.

The book is in a brand new condition and ship very fast. Excellent buyer.

I was very pleased with my purchase. The book I ordered arrived in a timely manner and it was in excellent condition.

This is a totally crappy book. It has a lot of mistakes, difficult to understand. Statistics itself is a tough subject, and to add to it the author uses unbelievable English literature and critism to his language.

Burn the book.