Customer Reviews

Probability and Statistical Inference (8th Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

I am currently teaching statistics (using a different textbook) and have been using the 6th edition of Hogg/Tanis as a reference. In my opinion, this is a pretty good text for someone who A) already has some idea of what statistics is all about and B) has a thorough understanding of calculus, which Hogg/Tanis make liberal use of. For someone who likes and understands calculus,
this is a much better introductory text than those that studiously avoid any mention of higher level mathematics. I give the 6th edition a 5-star rating based on the sections I've looked at so far.

With that said, I'm sorry to report that the 7th edition is not as good as the 6th. The authors have re-organized the material "for better logical organization", but in the process have lost some pedagogical clarity. For example, the relatively important student's t distribution has been relegated to an obscure example buried in a new chapter on the normal distribution, and the formerly excellent explanation of how this is derived is gone.

And speaking of "The Normal Distribution" chapter, do I really want all things normal relegated to a separate chapter? The pervasive use and importance of this distribution in statistics makes me think that it might be better to let the normal distribution pop up whenever it needs to be invoked, as was the case in the 6th edition. Including a "Sampling Distribution Theory" chapter (as was done in the 6th edition) makes a lot more sense than what they've done now. The new chapter on Bayesian Methods is short, and not terribly useful. Relegating this material to section 9.5 in a chapter on "Theory of Statistical Inference", as was done in the 6th edition was a much better decision.

The section on "Exploratory Data Analysis" (histograms and stemplots) has been moved from an introductory chapter (which no longer exists) to the chapter on "Continuous-Type Data". How does this make any sense? And yes, it is most definately a good idea to have an introductory chapter which talks about basic concepts and data visualizations. In the 7th edition, the mean, median, and standard deviation are first mentioned in chapter 2.

Finally, why on earth do authors think that randomly adding color to a textbook and widening the pages to allow for giant margins on every page makes a text more readable/useful when in fact just the opposite is the case? The wide margins add nothing and make the book both heavier and more unwieldy, and the blue section headings and graphs give it the feel of a junior high school algebra text. The compact elegance of the 6th edition stands in stark contrast to the large and comparatively garish 7th edition.

This revision has all the feel of something that was driven strictly by textbook marketing concerns and has nothing to do with either pedagogy or an interest in producing a excellent statistics book.

My advice? If you're looking for something for self-study or reference, get the 6th edition instead. It's better, and you can get a used copy on Amazon for next to nothing, since the lemmings have all switched to using the 7th edition and there are a lot of unwanted copies of the 6th floating around.

The nonsense of constantly producing new (and often inferior) editions of textbooks just so that publishers can make more money needs to be nipped in the bud.

There are good books on probability and statistical inference. This isn't one of them! If you are hunting for something - look for authors like James T. McClave or P. George Benson. James McClave has written some good books in this area.

Examples are HARD TO FOLLOW. There is no development of concepts. The writer doesn't seem to have any idea how to explain or how to provide examples. THIS IS NOT A BOOK THAT NORMAL PEOPLE CAN UNDERSTAND! IF YOU LIKE MATH OR WOULD LIKE TO UNDERSTAND MATH - DON'T BUY THIS BOOK! It does provide an example of what a book shouldn't look like!

I taught prob/stat from 99-02. The first year we used Tanis and Hogg 5th, the second 6th Edition, and the last two semesters were the current Larsen and Marx (much nicer IMO, at least on the readability and organization factor). I felt the 6th was a step backwards from the 5th in terms of organization and the 5th wasn't great for that. In fact, the 6th felt a lot more like the old 3rd edition I had when I was taking prob/stat for the very first time. In my experience, many of the flaws that other reviewers have noted are present in this book:

-Confusing transitions between theorems and examples in the main text, with theorems and examples not clearly delineated from surrounding text (particularly where they end), making it hard to use the book for reference as you work problems;
-Examples that have too many steps skipped;
-Problems which are often much more difficult than the examples in the text (that said, many of the problems in T&H are quite good, which I suspect explains the longevity of it as a text, well that, simple inertia among profs who have their lectures already written, and the publisher's sales staff :).

*I* could use it as a reference as it does cover a lot of topics pretty well. So what. If I'm teaching the material I *better* have a mastery over the material in the book! Student have got to be able to use it and they don't have that mastery. Bad organization simply obscures the material which, while not difficult from a straight mathematical standpoint, IS pretty difficulty conceptually IME.

If this is the 6th edition, I don't want to see the 1st edition! This book takes the simplest concepts and makes them convoluted and confusing; it lacks proper organization and repeats similar concepts chapter after chapter.

Please, if you are a professor looking at using this book to teach a class, consider others. I don't understand why it is so popular.

I studied the first 8 chapters of this book instead of attending the undergraduate lecture. This was a mistake. Tanis & Hoggs present probability and statistics, an otherwise interesting topic, in the most mechanical way imaginable. There is no reference (that I can recall) to any underlying mathematical ideas or questions, nor to the problems which originially prompted Poisson, Bernoulli, Gauss, etc. to inquire about the nature of "randomness" in physical events. The authors seem to suppose that their examples demonstrate such things by proxy. This book may make a decent reference for advanced students, but should not be used to teach those seeing prob & stat for the first time... that is, unless, you want it to also be their last.

I bought this book because it is our text book. At first I read it closely to understand the content. But I found it keeps confusing me by so much discussion that leads to nothing. The author seems to avoid concise and precise style of relation.

While studying statistics with this book I thougth I lack a gene or something because I couldn't make much sense of the subject. Today I know that the book is conceptually wrong.

The book is basically stuck in the 1930's, ignoring major breakthroughs by Shannon, Kolmogorov and others. Fundamental concepts like entropy, individual randomness and typicallity are completely missing.

Furthermore, the book is heavily biased towards hypothesis testing, with little mentioning of Bayesian statistics.

From a pedagogic point of view it must be said that statistical concepts emerged historically and are better understood when placed in the context of the original problems. This book does not do that at all.

If this is the 6th edition, I don't want to see the 1st edition! This book takes the simplest concepts and makes them convoluted and confusing; it lacks proper organization and repeats similar concepts chapter after chapter.

Please, if you are a professor looking at using this book to teach a class, consider others. I don't understand why it is so popular.

i'm not sure whether it's useful as a reference, but it's far from being a good textbook. obviously the authors didn't care to explain anything clearly. all they wanted was to write down all the relevant formulas to finish their book. no intuition is given at all. it's a pain to read and i would recommend both instructors and students NOT to use this book.

If this book was not required for the course, or I could not resell it (may the gods have mercy on whoever repurchases it), I would no doubt take my sweet time, dismembering and taking out my frustrations on it.

There are so many problems with this book I don't even know where to begin.

1.)Unorganized and convoluted. It is written in a style that does not go step by step, explaining each concept and giving examples as it goes along. Rather, it is as if the authors merely dictated what they knew of the subject matter and someone just typed up their words. It's written that way, like a long winded, dictation about statistics, and NOT like a textbook.
2.)The authors will go on long tangents of topics which you will NEVER come across on homework assignments or an undergraduate statistics course. But will often have merely 2 or 3 SENTENCES on IMPORTANT TOPICS that often saturates homework assignments and exams. In a nutshell, the authors DO NOT EMPHASIZE THE IMPORTANT TOPICS AND GO TOO FAR INTO TOPICS WHICH ARE UNIMPORTANT.
3.)All good math textbooks have no confusion at all about what the most salient information is for each chapter. But in this book, and the wordy style the authors have written it in, make it very difficult to pick out the important formulas and concepts. Like I said before, it's long winded, and unorganized. With words taking up about 90% of each page.
4.)THE EXERCISES ARE NOT LIKE THE EXAMPLES GIVEN. The examples given in this book are EXTREMELY simple, the most basic case imaginable for each topic. There is probably an average of 3 or 4 examples per section, each one for a topic (if you're lucky) and they are the SIMPLEST case. They do not begin to prepare you for the exercises which sometimes require knowledge not covered in the chapter (example, in the first chapter of the book, several of the exercises required knowledge of independent events before they were even covered.)
5. NO SOLUTIONS MANUAL.
How did this book became so popular among professors is beyond me. If the student wishes to learn from his/her mistakes how is that even possible if they don't know what they did wrong in the first place!? The back of the book is no help either, they just list the answers.

There are much more things I absolutely hate about this book.

The number one thing I hate most is that it makes mathematics seem frustrating, inelegant and lifeless.