4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good for Some, Hard for Others, February 20, 2011
This review is from: Business Statistics: A First Course (5th Edition) (Paperback)
I just finished up a college course on statistics which used this book. I earned an A, so I have a fair grasp of the material. The teacher was trying this book for the first time with the class, so she didn't have prior experience with it. After having used the book for the class, she was going to move on to another book. The class had that much trouble with it.
I have to say, for myself and my own experience, that I thought the book was reasonably well done. The intro examples were interesting. The way the book shades the key topics so you can find them quickly was helpful. The explanations were fairly straightforward.
However, as mentioned, many of my classmates had ALL sorts of trouble understanding the book. They ended up going on the web to find websites that explained the topics in better detail, and they learned more from their web searches than they did using the book. So that's not a good result.
Also I'm using the latest version of Excel and this book only has instructions for old versions of Excel. That meant any time I had to use Excel to do something I couldn't use the book at all. I had to use the web to figure out how to do my tasks.
There's a CD that comes with the book but I didn't use it at all. That was a personal choice because I wanted to re-sell my book with the CD untouched. I was able to do all the exercises simply by typing in my content manually into my own spreadsheet. That is, the CD isn't necessary.
I do have an issue with the test questions that the book supplies to teachers. They were outrageously poorly worded. Everyone in the class had issues with that. There were a number of questions that we found misleading. Since it's very common for teachers to simply cut and paste the book questions into their own test software, I absolutely feel that the book makers should update their test questions.
I originally was going to give this book four stars, but after re-reading all the issues with it, I think I'm going to drop that to three stars. There definitely needs to be a new update done with this book.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Pleased, January 13, 2012
This review is from: Business Statistics: A First Course (5th Edition) (Paperback)
I was very proud of how good of condition this book was in. It was a great price and I couldn't of got a better deal anywhere
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