First Course in Probability, A (8th Edition) [Hardcover]

Sheldon Ross (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 013603313X | ISBN-13: 978-0136033134 | Publication Date: January 7, 2009 | Edition: 8

A First Course in Probability, Eighth Edition, features clear and intuitive explanations of the mathematics of probability theory, outstanding problem sets, and a variety of diverse examples and applications. This book is ideal for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate level introduction to probability for math, science, engineering and business students. It assumes a background in elementary calculus.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sheldon M. Ross is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in statistics at Stanford University in 1968. He has published many technical articles and textbooks in the areas of statistics and applied probability. Among his texts are A First Course in Probability, Introduction to Probability Models, Stochastic Processes, and Introductory Statistics. Professor Ross is the founding and continuing editor of the journal Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, the Advisory Editor for International Journal of Quality Technology and Quantitative Management, and an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Bond Trading and Management.  He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a recipient of the Humboldt US Senior Scientist Award.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 552 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 8 edition (January 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 013603313X
• ISBN-13: 978-0136033134
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Sadly Inappropriate, March 15, 2010

By 

Sojournalist (Fairfax, VA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: First Course in Probability, A (8th Edition) (Hardcover)

I rarely review items I don't find to be worthwhile, but in this case, I sense that I may have specific complaints that will help buyers with a choice to keep from making a mistake. Although this item does cover the territory, it does it in a way that doesn't leave much room for positive recommendation.

My overall impression of the book is that it's very well organized, logically develops the topic, and loses it completely in the details.

Primary drawbacks:
* very few illustrations
* teaches by example rather than exposition
* examples are lacking in that they skip steps and sometimes leave results in incomplete states.

The title of the book leads you to believe that a moderately-educated student, in any one of a number of fields including "soft sciences," could use this book to learn probability. I quote from the Preface; "This book is intended as an elementary introduction to the theory... for students in mathematics, statistics, engineering and the sciences (including... the social sciences, and management science)...." However, reality is quite a bit far afield from this ideal. If you aren't very comfortable with single- and multi-variable calculus, and don't have a course in formal logic or mathematical proof under your belt, you will find this material difficult to read and master.

Examples are initially, and throughout, extremely dense and take a great degree of mental effort to unpack. For instance, the very first example in Chapter 3 on Conditional Probability reads as follows: "A student is taking a one-hour time-limit makeup examination. Suppose the probability that the student will finish the exam in less than x hours is x/2, for all 0 <= x <= 1. Then given that the student is still working after .75 hour, what is the conditional probability that the full hour is used?" What follows is a convoluted mess of probabilities, complementary probabilities, and probability transformations that are never explained before or after this example. (All of this is to demonstrate, for example, that the odds of getting two heads on two coin flips are different when you know one of the coins already turned up heads than when you flip two coins with no knowledge of what the outcome will be. (It's 1/3 instead of 1/4, because you know that you can't possibly get two tails.)).

Having sat through a number of math classes, I understand the need for abstraction to get at the root of an idea; some of the examples take this idea of abstraction just a little too far. For example, initiated by the idea that when the author "of this text drinks iced tea... he continuously refills the tea glass with water... and wonder[s] about the probability that his final gulp would be tea." The setup for this example continues: "Urn 1 initially has n red molecules..." and continues in this vein. It goes on for a page and half, just a bit complex. The probability, in case you're wondering turns out to be about e^-1 (or 1/e). We discover this by, again, transforming half a page of equations into (1 - 1/n)^n, which I'm sure you will recall from your explorations into sequences and series is the aforementioned quantity. Although I understand that the probability that the author's last sip will NOT be tea is 1- (1/e)... of what use this knowledge is, I don't know. The author happily continues on in this vein with yet more arbitrary calculations for another half-page or so.

My second complaint about this book is that even though it's in its Eighth edition, explanations aren't clear and it seems somewhat unfinished - it seems like it may have taken its authors and editors eight editions to get it to this convoluted state. Since it is in its eighth edition, why does it cost so much? Certainly it's not the quality of the exposition that sets this book apart or ahead of the many numerous other choices available. Perhaps there's some sort of dreadful Textbook Network Effect going on, and this one's been around the longest, is the most widely used... and is now the Cash Cow of the Probability Industry.

My next complaint with this text is the lack of illustration provided that makes this a dreadful read. Although I've only read the first five chapters (of some nine we'll cover in class), but I find the lack of clarifying illustration to be a severe drawback to understanding the examples. The illustrations that are provided seem to be the most basic that the authors could get away with. Almost no energy was exerted to bring any illustration to the provided examples - and what illustration there is could be done by a first year computer science student with a Linux box and LaTeX distribution.

I will say that there are plenty of examples, but it's not well-articulated why these examples were chosen. Some seem to repeat the same point, while others seems to introduce new material in the calculations without a mention - results that are used in later examples, again without mention of their development or reinforcement in text points subsequent to the actual example.

After re-reading this book, I'm still finding glaring omissions. For instance, it is common to find the median value for a continuous distribution by setting value = 0.5 and integrating to find the value of the integral of a particular distribution. This book does not discuss this technique, nor is it even mentioned in the index.

My final complaint about the examples given is not that they skip steps - this can be good for making a student work to figure out what's going on - but that often, the examples stop short of a complete solution. Students learn partially by observation, and seeing these examples leads a student to believe "that's all there is to it," which can result in an incomplete understanding of the goal as well as poor technique on graded work.

In short, even though this book has been through numerous revisions, I cannot find much to highlight as a positive, articulate exposition of probability. It develops its topic in the same way as innumerable other books on the subject. It seems to have little to no distinguishing features (other than the cost). And given the topic, I'm quite certain you can find alternative - or supplemental - materials that will help you master this subject.

Bottom line: I am giving this text two stars rather than one because, although it's a difficult read and inappropriately marketed (who would buy a book titled "Probability for the Pedantic, with Esoteric Examples?"), it does indeed cover the topic material in a logical order and to a depth that likely will make this a good reference book. I also haven't found any typos (yet). However, the book's poor readability, lack of illustrations, and unhelpful examples detract from its other intrinsic qualities. Stay away from this book unless you are a particularly well-prepared math student.

I would recommend The Probability Tutoring Book: An Intuitive Course for Engineers and Scientists (and Everyone Else!) as a supplement if you must use the reviewed book as a text.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Yin and Yang of It..., November 28, 2010

By 

Chris A. Christopherson "christcr" (Provo, UT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: First Course in Probability, A (8th Edition) (Hardcover)

Let me preface this by saying that I'm basing my review on an older edition from my math major undergraduate days. I'm now working through the book for the second time after many years.

I do like this book. It's topic coverage is good. The order is logical. There are plenty of examples. However... to tell you the truth, I really don't know how I got through the class all those years ago with an A. I'm working through it now and I see some glaring weaknesses (in my opinion as a math instructor) in the book that would be quite frustrating for someone seeing this material for the first time. It's even frustrating for me on round two! I'll tell you right now, you need more "mathematical maturity" than a year of calculus, an intro to linear algebra, and an intro to differential equations will provide.

First, I do like that there are tons of examples. But I think they could have been picked and graded in difficulty a bit better. It seems to me they are a bit polar. Some are trivial, routine problems, which I do understand are necessary. But the rest are almost always the sorts of problems you can spend days pondering. The same applies to the problem sets. So you get this effect where several problems are as easy to think through and do as a routine beginning calculus or algebra problem. Then you hit this wall and a problem can take days of pondering. There really needs to be something in between. The "theoretical problems" are even worse. Almost all of them are quite complicated proofs. There needs to be some more routine proofs in there as well.

Second, Ross tends to give all those examples--which is fine--at the expense of a bit more thorough base explanation--which is not fine. There needs to be a bit more development thrown in there.

Third, the problem sets need to be broken down into smaller sets for each subsection. By the time you've read all the pages between problem sets, you've started to forget the earlier stuff before you have a chance to firm in up with some exercises.

So, overall, this book is a mixed bag. Honestly, I wouldn't want to use it at this point as an introduction if I hadn't already gone through the stuff in the past. I think there are better books out there for this. Especially for self-study. I have several and I'm now ordering one that covers the material in a smoother manner and will give me less heartburn as I review. I think my favorites at this point are "Basic Probability Theory" by Ash (it's quite terse but things are explained well) and "Introduction To Probability" by Bertsekas (this one is actually the best I've seen--got it from a library and am now ordering my own copy). By the way, I have Ross' follow up "A Second Course in Probability" and strangely enough, the weaknesses with A First Course in Probability have been addressed for the most part. But his second course is more measure theoretic, and requires a bit of familiarity with analysis along the material from his first book.

If you have a choice in the matter or you are studying on your own, I'd say buy Introduction To Probability by Bertsekas and perhaps use Ross as a supplement or as a reference (it works well for those tasks). From there, if you're really into it, you might want to tackle "Probability and Measure Theory" by Ash/Doleans-Dade.

If you do use only Ross and want to understand the material in the book, be prepared to build your own bridges across some very wide rivers. Not the kind of thing you want when you are under the time constraints of a semester.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor textbook, May 11, 2010

By 

Eric11 - See all my reviews

This review is from: First Course in Probability, A (8th Edition) (Hardcover)

I'll be brief. This book is quite possibly the worst textbook I have ever used, in ANY subject. Ross's method of teaching is a service to those students in my undergraduate math courses who just want to look at examples all day so they can do the homework, rather than actually learning what the concept means. I'm not saying there shouldn't be examples, (a la many real analysis books) but there need not be as many as there are provided here. Important theorems and definitions are glazed over for the sake of more examples, and the explanations that are there are cut short...to make room for MORE EXAMPLES!!! The difficulty is not the issue, it's simply the method of teaching. Ask yourself: If I wanted help from a professor, and he kept throwing examples at me rather than explaining the subject, how long would I stay awake in the class (or enrolled in the class, for that matter)? I would give this book zero stars if possible, and it is the first math text I have purchased that I considered selling back. Terrible.