Customer Reviews

Elements of Engineering Probability and Statistics

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This book has an awful presentation of Probability in that it is way too brief. It hurts to read through this book. This book reads like it was put together in a weeks time. It is riddled with errors, some unforgivable. In short - SAVE YOUR MONEY. Stark and Woods is better, but not that great by any means. Is there a GREAT book out there on this subject?

In order to gain anything substantial from this book, you need a very good professor who can provide insight into the material. Only then will you be able to piece together the scattered bits of information in this book. The discussion is Brief. Yes, Brief with a capital "B." The chapter on random processes is particularly inadequate. For example, the significance of the autocorrelation function is never mentioned until one of the last lines of the chapter, when the author mentions that it shows interdependence between values of the random process at two time instants. Mind you, he does not show explicitly how the autocorrelation function shows interdependence; he is content to just throw it out there as if it were a matter of course (trust me, it is not a matter of course). There are numerous other examples I could give; for example, the presentation of conditional probability and the conditional pdf leaves too much to the imagination. Again, the reader may be able to piece together the logic with the help of a professor, and after doing so, the presentation in the book will make a heck of a lot more sense. Just don't expect any help from Ziemer.

I need to keep the review short because most of my time lately has to be spent trying to decifer Ziemer's presentation. In a few words, this book sucks! I believe the book to perhaps be the worst educational text I've ever encountered. It is riddled with errors and too few exaples to lend insight into the end of chapter problems. My professor tells me that there aren't any other (better) authoritative books out there on the subject. That's really hard to believe! Looks like there's some money to be made if anyone has the time or inclination to trump Ziemer's feeble attempt. Good luck if you must purchase it.