Customer Reviews

Probability, Statistics, and Queuing Theory with Computer Science Applications, Second Edition (Computer Science and Scientific Computing)

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

 

 

Excellent resource for statisics and queueing theory. Clear in depth presentation and plenty of examples. Author has a good presentaion style and is humorous as times. Makes you actually want to learn the material. Only fault is that it doesn't have any spreadsheet examples. (understandable though considering when it was published)

The book covers a lot of relevant material in sufficient detail. It's hard to find a good book on probability and queueing theory applied to computer science. This book is one of the best I have seen. The author does an excellent job of explaining the variables used in the different equations contained in the book, and also clearly explains the context in which various equations are used. Everything is well presented and easy to read. I continue to use the book as a valuable reference and highly recommend it.

I was about to review the book the first week I got it. Now two months passed and I think I am ready to review this book. I am a 4th year computer science phd student, with personal interest in statistics, which is not my thesis direction.

1. This book is a thorough book, not only cover the area of traditional probability theory, statistics and stocastics, it also thoroughly discussed queueing theory and other advanced topics, in a level of a special book for the topic.

2. This book is of a lot of typos, some of them are unforgivable - essential errors in formulaes. In the 2nd chapter, there are more than one typo per page. The typos are less in the later chapters, but more than any textbook I ever read.

3. The presentation is not good - it is not presented in a nice flow. I have to check back and forth to see where I am in the context. The language of the book is neither neat nor technical - we found a lot of ambiguities in the exercises - different people has different interpretation. Ironically, the author criticized a lot on other statistician's language, I would believe it is better than his. I would say, one may need to pay 1.8-2.5 times effort to understand this book than a well presented textbook.

4. The notation is too much but not good. In chapter 5., they author made a notation table in the front and for each chapter, there is a notation table in the appendix. Well, it is very normal to find some notations in a chapter not appears in the notation table.

5. The author want to cover too much content. Surely he know about the content but when he feel it is too challenging to cover, he put a citation there. To me, it may be better to just skip that part.

In general, if the author could sit down for a month or two, reread every chapter he wrote, think if it make sense or necessary, and re-present the book and correct the typos, it deserve 4.5 stars.

The book is acceptable; even though I didn't think the quality is matched with what the seller said. I think it is one rate below what he/she said. Anyway, it is OK.

This book may indeed make a good reference for one who regularly deals with the subject matter. However for the uninitiated (me) this book was a truly awful experience. It was used as a textbook my Probability/Queuing Theory class. It is almost completely useless for this purpose. Its language would be clear only to someone holding an advanced degree in mathematics, never to an undergrad. Our instructor had 20 (and growing) handwritten pages of errata.

If your instructor requires this book, you should waste no time in writing nasty letters to his superiors. You are in for a real trial.

Avoid this book at costs.