Customer Reviews

Engineering Statistics

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was the prescribed textbook for my statistics course. The book was not my choice, but I thought to myself, stats is stats, so any stats textbook is a good stats textbook. Let me go through the good points first, then I will talk about the issues that bugged me.

From content alone, I think this book is the first book that completely covers the critical aspects of statistics. I have never come across any text that explains the relationship between Type I and Type II errors as detailed and meticulously as this book. Other areas, such as ANOVA and decision making, are also very well covered. It might take a couple of readings to fully understand it, but in the end they did the best they could to explain these otherwise very difficult topics. I also liked the on-line support provided for the instructors. Contents and solutions could be easily obtained in digital format, and it greatly reduced the time for preparing lecture notes on Powerpoint.

However, I found this textbook a little difficult to teach from, particularly in their treatment of hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. This book introduces confidence interval is a special case of hypothesis testing, so both topics are lumped into one big unit. Though in retrospect I think this way is much more coherent, it also presents an almost vertical learning curve for the students. I had to go back to the "old" way of separating the two topics when I gave my lectures.

The other thing that bugged me about this book is the number of errors. Whole terms in formulae were missing, and some terms were not defined in previous equations at all. I hope they would get rid of them for the next edition. There was also another section, where the authors went off tangent on a topic. I was left wondering why they went on and on for pages until I saw an ad spot for some of their other textbooks.

The last thing was with the exercises and solutions. It was good that all the solutions are available to the instructors on-line, but sometimes I find that they are unintentionally vague. Some questions (at least the ones I assigned) were not very well explained, and students ended up taking a route, often one with the least resistance, that bore no resemblance to the material covered.

I really want to like this book, because I for one think that the organization of topics make logical sense, but as teaching material, I think the students will not appreciate the steep learning curve that is required for this text. Statistics (for engineering) is one of those courses where the mathematical foundations required to appreciate the concepts are simply beyond the understanding of the average student. The authors tried their best to bring some satisfaction in this department, but still not quite.

This would be a good book if only there weren't so many errors in the key to the exercise problems. I mean, really, there are A LOT of errors. Sometimes if you have an answer that differs from the answer in the key you can't be sure if you really made a mistake or if the answer in the key is incorrect.

I am sure the book is decent, I tried using it but found the teachers lectures much less confusing. Unfortunately she assigned many problems from the book and many of the answers were incorrect making it difficult to be confident in your work. In addition some answers were just missing or mislabeled. More of a side note than a complaint they used the tables in appendix A to solve problems rather than the true values using a calculator which can create some confusion if you are unaware of this.

The text was in execllent condition for a used book. Delivery to my daughter's dorm was prompt and she was able to use it on her second day of class. We were able to save almost $60.00 if she had purchase the same text at the campus bookstore. thanks

Ordered this book for a class, received it in a timely manner and in good condition. Would highly recommend to anyone.

I ordered this book because it was a requirement for my Statistics class. The book was way too expensive to be bought new from the school, so I decided to purchase it here on Amazon. I received the book a few days after I purchased it and it is as good as new!

My book does not include the appendix at the back. It stops right after chapter 8. I bought my book new on Amazon and it came in shrink wrap. It is not an international addition. I found at least one other classmate who had the same problem as me. If at all possible, please send me the pages from the back appendices.

Everything was great, the item arrived quickly in good condition. No complaints at all.