Most Helpful Customer Reviews
105 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent but with glaring mistakes, August 18, 2008
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Statistics, 2nd Edition (Mass Market Paperback)
Overall, I think this is an excellent book on statistics; both as an initial primer for beginners and as a review for those non-statistician who have some background in the field. It is well written and flows nicely. The author does a very good job of presenting complex issues in a simple and understandable manner using real life scenarios. He then builds on the simple concepts to higher levels of complexity. It goes without saying that, as with any endeavor that deals with mathmatics, it is essential that the reader perform the exercises at the end of each chapter. This assures a reasonable understanding of the topic before moving on to the next. Contrary to one of the other reviewers, I found the contents and index sufficient. I could easily find specific topics that I was interested in pursuing without having to read large sections. Based on these impressions, I would have given the book 5 stars. However, the mathmatical errors and misstatements, while small for a book of 385 pages, are substantial when you consider the difficulty a beginner might have trying to figure out such concepts as "hypothesis testing" and "z scores". I could easily see a novice spending hours trying to understand or figure out answers to questions when the information given is inaccurate. I would still recommend this book highly, especially for beginners. However, I would suggest that they go to the website that list the errors before starting the book. I would also recommend that the author reference this site at the top of the first page of chapter one in the third edition of the book.
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47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful, January 2, 2008
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Statistics, 2nd Edition (Mass Market Paperback)
This really helped me get up to speed on statistics quickly. The Excel formulas were most useful for real life application. Some books are worth several times there price for what you get out of them. For me, this is one such book. I found the examples easy to follow considering the complex subject matter. Five stars.
Topics covered include: standard deviation, median, mode, proablity theory, Chebyshev's theorem, frequency distributions, Bayes theorem, binomial and Poisson probability distributions, inferential statistics, standard error of population, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, chi-square, and ANOVA.
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
No clarification on 2-tail, wrong answers, good for bare bones, September 21, 2007
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Statistics, 2nd Edition (Mass Market Paperback)
I attempted to use this as a supplement to a graduate level course in statistics. While the first 3 chapters are an enjoyable read, the book falls short for lack of clarification on z-tables for left and right tail questions. The result of this are wrong answers within some the summary conclusions - perhaps the author himself was confused? I will be returning the book and looking for something a little bit more straightforward, and less whimsical.
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