Customer Reviews

Elementary Statistics (11th Edition)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Our department has used Triola's statistics book for our large,
multi-section baby stats course for at least the past six years, and
it was through simple inertia that we adopted the 11th edition. Using
the earlier editions, I had almost begun to like Triola's
follow-the-recipe approach, and was able to make the course useful to
some of our students.

The 11th edition, however, is far worse than anything that came
before. The publishers have made numerous changes to format, style,
and content, and not one of them is for the better.

Format: The new edition has more clutter than ever in the margins.
Just about every page contains a distracting and usually irrelevant
sidebar, and color photographs (likewise irrelevant) push their way
into the text everywhere, as if the deisgners were trying to show off
their collection of pictures and their ability to flow text around
them. The actual text, when you can find it amid this clamoring
circus of marginal distractions, is marred by too-frequent changes in
background color and font size. It's difficult to read, and it's
difficult to orient oneself in the text, because the designers, while
splashing color and font changes all over the place, somehow managed
to make the chapter and section headings disappear. Just try to find
the beginning of Section 4-4. The decision to use a
proportional-space font in the tables of numbers on the Formulas and
Tables card suggests that the designer has never done any work with
tables of numbers.

Style: It's clear from the writing style that Dr. Triola is no longer
involved in the manufacture of the product that bears his name. (Or
else he had a very good copy editor in the earlier editions, who is
gone now.) A few paragraphs survive from the earlier editions, but
those that have been altered or inserted were written by someone
without the original author's grasp of English grammar. The new
author is also less careful about precise mathematical phrasing, and
is rather careless about things like referring to the probability of
an event that has already happened or the probability that a parameter
has a certain value. Many of the exercises now include a "tag-line"
question that is probably meant to help the students interpret the
results. A few of these questions are useful, but far more of them
require the student to speculate on or make judgments about subjects
with which he is almost certainly unfamiliar. In any case, they are
annoying, both to the student and to the instructor who must keep
repeating "Don't worry about that last part."

Content: How is it that later editions of the same book contain more
errors than earlier ones? Here are a few particularly nasty mistakes
that have been allowed into (or created for) the 11th edition:

Page 148, Exercise 9. "When rolling a single die at the Venetian
Casino in Las Vegas, there are 6 chances in 36 that the outcome is a
7." Does no one proofread these exercises? (Or does the Venetian
Casino really use 36-sided dice?)

Page 168, Exercise 17. The table supplied with the exercise is
missing its column headers. Again, this should have been caught by a
proofreader.

Page 433. There is an error in the presentation of the main formula
to be used in this section. And it's not just a slip-up in the
narrative text: The formula presented in the highlighted box is
incorrect. This is inexcusable. How could the proofreader have
missed it?

Page 484, Exercise 25. The exercise describes an observational study,
and concludes with the question "Should marijuana use be of concern to
college students?" The answer provided in the back of the book
suggests that the study shows a causal relationship between marijuana
use and impaired mental ability. This is in direct contradiction to
the rule that is so emphatically stated on pages 19 and 20: causality
may not be inferred from an observational study. The original author
would not have allowed such a blatant error to find its way into the
"officially correct" answers.

On the Formulas and Tables card -- the one that students use as a
reference when they're doing problems and taking exams -- the formula
for the chi-square test statistic is incorrect. How, then, are we to
trust anything else on this card? Where was the proofreader?

It does appear that Addison-Wesley, in the custom of the modern
producer of textbooks, rushed this edition through the mill, in order
to have all those overpriced copies on college bookstore shelves by
the beginning of the fall semester. In doing so, they apparently
omitted to have the book proofread or to give much thought to how
thoroughly the new design would discourage anyone from actually
reading it. Of course, it's possible that there's something even more
meretricious going on, and the publisher inserted the errors (all new
to the 11th edition) on purpose, so that the 11th edition could more
quickly be made obsolete, and replaced by an even more overpriced 12th
edition. I wouldn't put it past them.

This is the strangest math textbook I've ever seen. The content that it covers could be boiled down to 100 pages or less. The actual math content is sparse, and much of the book is wordy paragraphs that try to explain concepts, but end up making things harder to understand. Also, I can't remember seeing a single proof in this book!

I had to use this book years ago for a online statistics course at a community college. I've recently been working on something that requires heavy use of statistics, and needed to research some things because I forgot most of what little I had learned from my past statistics course. I remembered I had this book laying around, and decided to look up what I needed to know. Totally useless. The book didn't even contain the Bayes' Theorem! All it had was a small section saying it was on the CD; which I didn't have.

All I can say is that this book should only be used as an introductory high-school course text, or as a supplemental book to a college course for people who find the author's writing more understandable than a book heavy on math notation. Personally, I found the author's writing less understandable than heavy math notation. Though, that may just be me.

Simple to read book. Great examples and explanations that makes learning easy. A bit too pricey for what it is...

I am using this book in a basic statistics course via MyMathLab. I purchased the book as part of MyMathLab, and I'm publishing my review here so that others will know. The online version of the text costs $80.00. That is by far the most expensive ebook I've ever purchased. According to Pearson (the people who produce MyMathLab) I am only able to access the book while online. There is no way to download it to my device. The other reviewers are absolutely correct - it contains an incredible about of material that has little or nothing to help students learn statistics. I can only use the ebook while I am registered for the course. Once that registration expires, I do not have access to the book ever again under any circumstances for the rest of my life. The $80.00 I paid for the ebook is gone, and so is the book, once the course is over. If I actually wanted to use the book in a real life situation after I complete the course (which I would never recommend), I'd have to buy the paper version at full price - which I won't do.

Since the book is part of MyMathLab, I can not copy or paste text, so there is no way to make notes of my own based on text in the book. Nor is there any way to highlight text, or add comments to the text. There is no way to save the text.

In addition to the errors mentioned by other reviewers, there are other very frustrating designs in the text. Most obvious is the complete lack of links. If the text says "see Appendix B", there is no link in the text to Appendix B. It might be 600 pages away, and it's up to the student to figure out how to find it. The table of contents can get someone to chapter headings, but it's not easy or intuitive.

There are a lot of other issues with the book and the ebook. For example, the page size can not change, so I can not set it to fit onto my screen. Many times when i scroll to the bottom of a page it bounces back up to the top. So I drag it back down. It bounces back up. This isn't funny, it's horrible design. I can go on and on and on with horrible design issues in the ebook, but you get the idea.

Bottom line - I'm supposed to be learning statistics with this system. It's not working. I'm going to simply Google the topics (such as "How to make a histogram") and learn that way, and/or get some other statistics book to learn from. This is education in spite of the text. The text itself in the ebook does not flow well, it is not easy to follow, and all of that makes it very difficult to learn statistics. All the animations and videos do NOT help nearly as much as they take away from learning the basic ideas and then practicing them. I like the goals of making the material relevant and practical, but those benefits are vastly outweighed by all the problems and issues.

Everyone already knows if you buy the paper version of the book that it is vastly overpriced, and if you get the ebook, now you know that it gets taken away when the course ends. To top it all, you'll need to use another book or method to learn statistics while you are in class if you really want to excel and master the subject. I would give this book negative stars if Amazon would allow it, it's really that awful. Recommendation: Avoid at all costs.

This is a popular and required text for most Statistics courses. It's a decent read, and as textbooks go, it's pretty good. Although I had an older edition of this book, I was required to purchase the newer (and costlier) edition for my independent-study course, so that my text would correspond to the instructor's. While this was just a nuisance for me, the whole billion-dollar textbook racket is just that -- a racket. It is making a needless dent in parents' pocketbooks and down the line will probably result in spinal-column and back problems for the masses of students who have to lug around these needlessly hefty and expensive books.

As a h.s. science teacher, I've reviewed new editions of textbooks and compared them to the older editions. What I have found: Often, there is a tiny bit of new info in the newer texts, a few new problems, and a new "appearance". One major publisher took the older version, juggled around and renumbered the problems at the end of the chapter, switched a few sections from the main part of the text with sections in the Appendix, put on a different cover, reformatted some pics,... and voila' ... a new edition. It's always bigger and weighs more than the older edition, so the price is more. The old storyline that the pretty glossy pictures will engage the students is pure baloney!!

My old college chem book from the 70's (UMASS) sold for $10 new, $2.70 used. No glossy pics, but all the info was there and it's half the size and weight of current h.s. texts. A few years ago, a Japanese foreign exchange student showed me her h.s. chem book from Japan: All the topics were explained, plenty of practice probs, and the book was softcover about 6" x 9" and about 1/2" thick.

As I see some poor freshmen (esp. the girls) struggling to walk with these heavy books on their backs, I wonder --why are parents not outraged?

Once again, another higher level educational tool designed to be revised. It's no wonder why books as such are only used for one semester then become obsolete. Designed with a "newly revised" version already planned out later on to follow, meanwhile the presses are still smokin' from the last travesty...
Read other unfavorable comments written, statements (likely posted by math professors) that mention students hating this and other "New" books published.
The intent is to give facts, but as stated in my class by the professor "The math has not changed". Keep up the good work Mario Triola, next time write it in the Coptic language so everyone can have a thorough understanding!

I am taking a Undergrad Statistics course for my Psychology degree, and I only have three classes remaining until the matriculation of my degree. I can, fully and competently state that this is the BEST textbook I have read in my entire educational experience. I have dyslexia, and due to that disability it is more challenging for me to grasp mathematical problems and concepts. The author has done a great job a explaining how to understand the problem and apply it to the task. The author does not use any unnecessary words, but gets straight to the point in a very plain and simple understanding manner. The textbook is also very visually appealing, and laid out in way that makes learning the concepts easier to understand.

I found this course very challenging, and I rate down a bit only because I feel the textbook should provide the answers to the questions in the book to help answer and understand our homework assignments. However, I was fortunate enough to be able to get THE ANSWERS TO EVERY QUESTION in each chapter WITH detailed descriptions. Once you have these solutions, I gladly would rate the product five stars.

If you need these solutions, you can write me a mail at avantika_sil at yahoo dot com.

This book is intended for all majors. I think, it is one of the best if not the best book out there in explaining in simple words statistical theory and analysis.

The book's content does not justify its ridiculously high price. The format/style of the book is TERRIBLE. If you read it, you will know that there are many DISTRACTING sidebars in almost every section. It contains IRRELEVANT information.

Another stupid thing about this book is that the author constantly reminds us that many problems can be solved with technology (such as a graphing calculator or other computer softwares). And yet, the author does not actually teach us how to use a graphing calculator to solve the problems. So even though the author keeps emphasizing that we should not waste too much time doing the problems manually, since he does not teach us how to use a graphing calculator to solve these problems, we students still have to waste a lot of time doing manual work by following his formulas anyway.

It's retarded.

I don't understand why in the world my math professor is using this terrible book. Stupid professor.