Customer Reviews

Miller and Freund's Probability and Statistics for Engineers (6th Edition)

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

 

 

This is probably the second worst textbook I have ever read. I have struggled through the third chapter. In some cases, the text seems as though it was written for elementary school math covering set therory: extremely detailed and excessively verbose. In other cases, the text throws out examples without explaining any reasoning, or any how or why a formula is used.

The text continually refers to examples in previous sections, which forces the reader to search back through the text. The interuption is distracting and annoying. In many cases, the page numbers where the example can be found are not given. The text also does this with the exercises, forcing the student to wear-out the pages. Sometimes, I feel as though I need two copies of the textbook so I don't waste so much time thumbing back and forth.

I have ended up reading and re-reading the text while trying to understand some of the concepts and rational. In some areas, the author does not explain anything. While other times, the text continues for pages explaining things that an elementry school graduate should know. I am waiting to see multiplication tables in future chapters. All the while, some college level information is brushed-over. I typically need to work several exercises and beat my head against the wall a few times until I go ah ha! Why didn't the author explain this.

With textbooks like this, it is no wonder engineers have a reputation for poor communication skills.

For 6th edition:

One may use this book as a handbook for some statistical problems. However, I find it very poor in terms of reading it from scratch. Moreover, many important issues are not covered, and those covered are not very analysed.

i.e. I cant find the transformation of stochastic variables, The properties of the gaussian d. are not fully covered. No Rayleigh or Rice distribution? After all I am not sure this book is for engineers.

The book is rather well written. It starts with verty simple probability theory and then describes densities and gets into tests and other topics. The level of math is reasonable and I think undergraduates in both engineering and economics should be able to handle that level of math. Every topic comes with numerical examples which makes it easy to get ideas. There are exercises in the book too and many of them (but not all of them) are helpful for understanding. At the end of the book you can conveniently find tables of distributions and different statistics you can use. I am still using those tables for my works. The only downside is that the book doesn't cover much of probability (like functions of random variables). The distribution covered are mainly to build basis for later chapters about testing. So I would say this is a good book for those who want to learn statistical tests and reliability.

The probability and statistics for engineeting book provides a very good first book on probability and statistics. It is very useful to engineers and scientists that need to analyse and interpret data. It has a very good material on statistical inference and on quality and reliability. I strongly recommend this book.

Be aware that you're purchasing a "Solutions Manual". The answers/solutions are to questions that are not in this book. The questions are in another textbook.

For the most part this is actually one of the better statistics books I have used. It's greatest strengths lie in the number of examples provided and the "Do's and Don'ts" at the end of each chapter. The narratives and proofs do a fairly decent job of introducing and developing new concepts and formulas, and there is generally a good segway from one topic to the next. If you have other statistics books like I do, this book actually does a good enough job deriving each distribution that things became clear here that I had always puzzled over in my other books. It is admittedly a bit distracting at times when an example references data from an earlier example in a previous chapter requiring you to bookmark pages with your fingers so that you can flip back and forth as you work through an example. In other areas, at times an example might skip a few steps which will require you to think through how they made the leap. Still, despite these shortcomings and the occassional errata, I still believe this is one of the better statistics textbooks.

I used this textbook for my engineering statistics class. Overall, the text was very helpful. It has clear and accurate information with lots of examples. I could teach myself the majority of the class material by reading this textbook and working through the practice problems. Also, the chapters are not excessively long. The focus of each chapter is direct and clear.

Only gave 4/5 stars because the book is not 100% perfect. There are some small typos here and there. None major.

this is a Indian Reprint - RS 350.00 (Original US edition - RS 3362.00)

but there's no difference in content.

I refunded the book because my friend lend me his. I thought the process would be troublesome, but it actually was not. Thanks! =)

This is truly the worst "math" book I've ever used. Too many very important pieces of information are just incidentally glossed over in the text, which is often vague (as if it assumes you know statistics already). As if the vagueness of the material were not bad enough, the homework problems do not provide a sufficient challenge to allow you to see if you actually understand the material after reading it (note to authors, EXAMS ARE NEVER JUST PLUG AND CHUG). Hmmm... vague text and poor test of comprehension in the homework problems, sounds like a disaster waiting to happen if it isn't the case that you've had some statistics before(maybe if you have a good professor this may not be necessary, mine was horrendously bad and that made me depend all the more on this piece of garbage). Oh yeah, before I forget, the price is absurd for such a poor quality, and thin book. If you can, please search hard for a good book before suffering with this piece of work,even the schaum's outlines can be a bigger help than this (and they're not that great themselves.)

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Note to intro stat professors:
Look at the title before you assign this text. We're not engineers yet and some of us aren't planning to become engineers. Perhaps this was the reason for my bad experience with the text.