Customer Reviews

Introduction to Probability and Statistics

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I had to buy this book for an introductory graduate stats class. This book assumes you have some knowledge of stats and so provides very brief explanations for most concepts. This is a big problem for students with little or no stats background.

Another problem is that there are too few examples. Considering their meager explanations, one would hope they would at least provide enough examples to help students understand the concepts. But they usually provide only one or two problems, which are woefully inadequate.

Also, the CD is totally useless. Most of the practice is multiple choice, which I think is pretty silly for a stats class. In addition, there is no explanation for how they got to the answer, so if you can't figure it out and choose the wrong answer, you're out of luck for any explanation.

I stopped using this book for my course and instead began using Elementary Statistics, A Step by Step Approach by Bluman. This book is excellent; it explains everything from step 1. There are also many, many examples and lots of pictures to help you further understand stats. Also, they explain very clearly when you should use the different formulas, which I found extremely helpful in bringing all the concepts together.

The text we used for our undergrad Stats class covered the exact same material as this text, which we used for a graduate level class and which cost about 60 bucks more, but the undergrad text was written more clearly, concisely and logically. We even found a mistake in one of the tables in the back of this book.

Author: Computer Science/Mathematics Undergraduate at Cameron University

This book was required for an introductory non-calculus based statistics course at my school and it turned out to be a mixed bag. The theories are explained well in most cases but the book doesn't have enough examples for all of the theorems. Many times only one case is explained in dynamic situations leaving this reader more than a little lost. Usually the theorems are explained well enough that this is not a big deal, but not so in every case. So there tends to be those points where the student may get a little stuck without assistance from their professor.

Another problem I found was that the book was a little bit dumbed down in many areas. This book uses no calculus, so the theories are presented often without the mathematical rigor required to properly formulate accurate results. The book still presents the theorems and formulas in a way where the student can get something out of this without calculus, but it becomes a problem later in the book in the sections on regression. For a non-calculus based class like the one I took, this is all unavoidable, so the book handled the situation well considering the constraints.

This book presents a very light introduction to statistics and is good prep for more advanced statistics courses, but as a stand-alone only the most basic material is presented since it is non-calculus based and the material is spread thin between combinatorics, probability, binomial distributions, normal distributions, t distributions, ANOVA tests, regression, non-parametric statistics, etc... To attain a significant amount of useful knowledge you really need to buy separate books tackling each of these subjects independantly, so this book is really unneccessary even for an introductory text but might serve well the student who needs to be eased into statistics lightly or just wants a brief overview of the subject.

We all know how it goes:

You get lost in Stats class because A) your professor isn't communicating well, B) your professor is smart but his accent is unintelligible or C) you missed the previous day to do an observation for one of your major courses...

...so you crack open the way-overpriced textbook to catch up, right?



Wrong! At least not with this awful one.



Almost everyone in my class (including the professor's other sections) failed both midterms and nearly failed the final exams. Now, I don't have a problem with not stopping for questions in class as long as I can catch up while studying on my own... but it was damned near IMPOSSIBLE with this textbook.

I don't know what Mendenhall and the Beavers are smoking out at UC Riverside (which happened to by our professor's alma mater), but so many of the examples given in each section wouldn't make sense, were completely different, were not preceded by actual instructions or paragraphs explaining what you were about to do. Talk about being thrown to the wolves with no explanations!

Some of the applets on the CD were interesting (playing with graph results, etc) but unnecessary. I would rather have cut the CD out of the book and had more pages of INSTRUCTIONS!

We all know textbooks are overpriced, but this was one of the only times where I genuinely felt like I had wasted my money.

If your professor requires this book, BEWARE! You had better show up to every class meeting, take meticulous notes, and ask lots of questions... because this book will be of NO help to you.

First, I cant believe that people actually used this book in a graduate class. I taught out of this book to freshmen.

A lot of the notation in this book is horrible and I feel this makes it harder for people new to the subject to read. Also there are very few exercises for the students to practice. In addition, too many of the answers in the back of the book are incorrect (this really confuses students).

I will not be teaching out of this book again.

This was the required text for my Introduction to Probability and Statistics course. The course was a required pre-requisite for the bachelor of science nursing program. The intended membership of the course was non-math majors, ie nursing and business majors. The book was very difficult to use. There were not enough example problems nor are there enough simple english explanations. In my course evaluation at the end of the term I emphatically stated the department needed to find a new text for the course. I was very happy to sell it back. The study guide is not worth the money either. Every other odd problem is not enough to learn from.

I purchased textbook because it was required by my Biostatistics professor in my graduate program. Personally, I do not like the book. It makes problems more complicated than they need to be. I feel a good textbook is one in which you can read on your own and basically understand it without a whole lot of instruction and review by your professor. It would be very difficult to just read this textbook and then take an exam. I have only had the book for several weeks and I think it makes Biostats more complicated. I did purchase the supplement that goes with it, which is good for practice and the CD allows you to take self-test. If you are not savvy in stats, purchasing the supplemental practice book may be the thing for you to do if your professor requires use of the textbook.

I purchased this book for a statistics course required for my master program. The chapters are easy to read but I think it would have been better to have more examples in each section.

Pretty good- but having the correct teacher to explain the book is what made it AWESOME! Good luck with yours.

This book is a classic. Mendenhall set the standard for pre-calculus introductory textbooks with the first edition of the book, and he and his co-authors have continued this level of excellence through subsequent editions. I prefer introductory statistics books that are concise yet reasonably comprehensive. This book meets this requirement. It covers such topics as descriptive statistics, probability, estimation, hypothesis testing, regression, analysis of variance, chi-square tests, and nonparametric methods. The fact that it is in its 13 edition attests to its enduring popularity.