Customer Reviews

Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists (7th Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

With an exception of Chapter 1, this book is well written, well organized with logical flow of subjects, and having practical example for every chapter's sub-topics. I found most of these examples are simple and very supportive for the understanding of mathematical expressions and that link the underline subject with real-world application. This book, in my opinion, is an excellent text for science and engineering students as well as for scientist or professional engineer who wants to achieve his or her self-study of the fundamentals of probability and statistics.

If Chapter 1 had provided a right level of abstract for an introduction of book's chapters and eliminated trivial / obvious errors (e.g. on pp. 9 and 10) in this chapter then, I believe, the reader's impression of the book would increase significantly.

This book was my battlehorse when I was an Engineer Industrial student in the eighties . Stiil I bought the second Edition , this one has a visible quality above the others . His nice presentation , the increased level of difficult in every chapter .
Useful for those Enginnering students , Pharmace, Administration in Pre Grade and Post Grade students .

This is a required text for my statistics course. Personally, I do not understand why this text has been selected.

There are mistakes throughout the book. This causes a lot of frustration as wasted time.

There are very few examples in the book, and there are not examples that illustrate all concepts. Some of the examples start out explaining a certain concept, then instead of solving it all the way through, show how it can be transformed into a different problem which is then solved a completely different way.

There are answers in the back of the book to odd numbered problems, as is normal in most math books. However, that is all. Simply the answers. The work required to acheive the answers is not present, so it can be very difficult to determine where a mistake has been made (Whether in your own work, or if the book is incorrect).

The writing itself is very convoluted and uses far too much jargon for this to be a useful teaching text. I feel that the authors were more interested in making themselves sound intelligent than actually trying to help a student understand the material.

If looking for a statistics text, look elsewhere.

This is one of the better undergrad-level books on the subject, and the fact that it's now in it's 7th edition (as of this writing) shows that it's still in use in the halls of academia. My copy, if I remember correctly, is either a first or second edition.

Unfortunately for me, I had a sub-par instructor (and a different text book) the first time I studied the material, and even though I got high marks in the class, I re-audited the class again, on my own time, with a different instructor, the following semester. The different instructor, and text book (this one), made a big difference, and really helped bring the material to life for me ... even though it cost me half of a perfectly good summer vacation to do it.

Let's face it ... probability computations, permutations, and confidence intervals, can be a bit dry (and a hot classroom with no air conditioning didn't help matters), but Wadpole does a decent job of not only covering the material well. There are plenty of worse books on the material out there, trust me. This one's better than others I've seen.

I haven't noticed the mistakes the other reviewers have mentioned; perhaps they reviewed an earlier edition, or I haven't gotten far enough (through ch. 8). Anyway, the book is awful purely on account of the author's inability to make the concepts clear, and to use terminology precisely -- perhaps this fog is masking the errors. Fwiw, others in my class agree. Also, the index is uselessly short, so if you don't remember the meaning of some term defined in the text, you'll have to hunt for the imprecise definition page by page. In sum: unclear and difficult to use. Seek another alternative if at all possible.

I don't have the 7th Edition, but the 6th Edition is helping greatly. The explanation of concepts are crystal clear and the examples make sense, are well explained.

I'm a second year computer science student taking a course on probability, and this is the book we are using. Why, I don't know, because it's not a very good book. I'm not a note-taker, and have a difficult time paying attention in math classes, so I usually teach myself from the book. With a 3.6 GPA, I'd say it usually works. Not so with this book.

This book lacks sufficient examples and the definitions and explanations of theorems are confusing. To its credit, it has odd answers in the back, but that's standard for math books. However, it lacks any answers to the review exercises at the end of each chapter, making the review exercises nearly worthless.

Don't buy this book if the class doesn't require it. This textbook has many mistakes. Try to save your money or buy another book. Trust me don't waste your money to buy it.

I am now reading the second edition of this book, printed in 1978. It is a low-cost Collier Macmillan International Editions copy and the paper is, naturally, yellowish. This is a simple printing using only black fonts and gray boxes for definitions and theorems. Can you imagine a Statistics textbook with no pink, red, purple, green, and blue popping into your eyes from every corner of the page? Texbooks used to be this simple (and affordable) before most of today's college students were even born. For example, all chapter exercises (not only the odd-numbered ones) are answered at the end of the book. I guess the editors in the seventies weren't smart enough to come up with the best way of liberating students' pokets from the occupation of the mighty dollar: don't provide the answers in the book but print a Student Guide instead. Even the newer editions of this book use this approach.

How about the rest of the book? The second edition is a a decent book, concise and clean. The presentation is a bit dry by today's cluttered standards, but I found enough examples to illustrate the concepts and results. The material is well organized, with the mathematical expectation presented together with standard deviation and variance, as it should be. The section on joint probability distributions is one of the best I've seen. Some notations are a bit dated but you will have no problem understanding them.

So I think you will be able to learn probability and statistics from this book by yourself. Unless you're some straight A senior math college student who's never heard of permutations and combinations.

I'm a professional who works in the tech industry, and I'm pretty competent in Stats. I'm taking a Design of Experiments class this term for my masters program, and for whatever reason the instructor chose to use this book. It's utterly useless, piece of [literature]. The explanations are poor, no good examples, and NO ERRATA for a error-prone book!! I wonder if the authors paid instructors to use this book, because it's simple one of the worst books ever written. I'm sellign this junk right afterwards.. it's not even worth the shelf space... use it for toilet paper maybe!