Customer Reviews

Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists (with CD-ROM)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

as was mentioned Hayter is an ISyE professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. FYI i'm an ISyE student at the GIT.

The Good: The explanation of the theory and examples are excellent, (and i really don't do well with P-theory naturally) and what i really like is the kind of examples he uses: machine breakdowns, part failures, fabrication tolerences etc...i had another intro stats book that never broke away from colored balls and die and cards...also the solutions manual that goes along with the book does better than average at actually showing you how the problem was solved and includes a lot of prose explanation along with the math.

The Bad: part of the bad is good, which is he revisits the same examples throughout the book so you are already very familiar with the scenario (ie..in chapt 2 there is an example considering metal cylinder thickness, and the same example, same pmf or pdf and numbers, etc will be used in chapter three to illustrate more complex ideas)...the bad part is that he doesn't restate the original scenario in the problems at the end of the section so you have to flip back and find it to remember what the distribution was or what the state space or any of the specifics of the problem....and this can become cumbersome when in problem after problem you have to go back and look up the details... i know this is saving redundant printing; maybe i'm just lazy

I teach statistics and research methods to political science and public administration/policy students, and I've found this book to be the best comprehensive text on introductory statistics. It beats all statistics texts I've seen written for the social sciences. It's too bad the title of this text and its examples limit its audience, because social science classes could use its clear explanations of the methods.

This book is the best book I've encountered for explaining the fundamentals of probability and statistics. The arrangement of topics is right on the money and the explanations are clear. The book's most impressive feature, however, is the large number of example problems and the illustrations that go with them. This book will be refreshing to those students disgusted by the esoteric (or at least confusing) style found in most other university statistics books, yet Hayter still manages to provide enough of the mathematical details to avoid "watering down" the content.

This book is not designed for people who are starting to learn statistics or probability. Use this book ONLY if you have undergraduate degree in mathematics or engineering (just like the book says). You NEED to have calculus background in order to understand some portions of the book. There are a number of reasons why I don't personally like this book.
1) Examples cited jump around a lot. There really needs to be a central example library instead of searching through the whole book looking for the example. For example, it would say "Example 38" and talk about how to do a calculation for the chapter but in order to find the data on Example 38, you would have to search another chapter or another part of the book. Why make it so difficult to find the example? Make it easy to access. Don't make me waste my time searching through the whole book, looking for the data on Examples.
2) Index is very poorly designed, if not useless. You have to search for a topic in a number of ways to find anything. It is too limited.
3) Calculations are not fully spelled out. For example, Hayter makes too many assumptions. For example, you cannot skip around to cover different topics because if you do, you wouldn't understand how he obtained the answer. I don't understand why he didn't spell out everything or omits steps and gets right to the answer. To me, process is more important than the answer.
4) Talking about answers, Study Guide is also very useless in my opinion. It only gives you the answer and does not tell you how you get it. What's the use of having the study guide if it doesn't tell you how you got the answer? It was waste of money to buy the study guide.
I believe there are a lot of great books on probability and statistics. In my opinion, this is NOT one of them.

I used Walpole's piece of $hit book for my Prob/Stat for Engineer's class at UC San Diego...this book saved me and provided me with the means to get a good grade and actually learn the material.

I received this book very quickly, but it was packaged poorly and arrived with a few minor bends and tears in the cover. As most know, this can drastically affect the resale value of the book. I contacted customer support upon arrival and told them the condition in which the book arrived. Customer support offered to send me another after I ship them the first one (with a label they provided). I explained to the representative that I start classes very soon and would like to have it without waiting for the ground shipping to reach them. She then offered to send me another book and allowed me to ship the first book back using the box in which the second one arrived. I was very pleased with the customer service and the second book arrived in pristine condition. Good customer service is very important and the quality for the second book was excellent (even though I had to wait one extra day).

Overall experience was excellent.

This is a good textbook for learning the basics of probability and statistics. It is written at the graduate level, and breaks into single and multivariable calculus without missing a beat. The calc tripped me up because it has been a while since I've seen it, and there is no refresher in the text.
It reads easily and uses a lot of real-world examples to illustrate concepts, which makes it easy to comprehend and apply.

This book is great if you are an engineer. What about the scientists? The examples were awful. Nothing like the problems that followed. The step by step working of the examples left plenty to be desired. This book was required text for my class at Utah State and I absolutely hated it. I enjoy statistics, so it is not the subject. Would love as a student to see the problems worked out in the chapter in a way that would help me when I got to the problem sets at the end of the book.

I would have prefered another book for Probability and Statistics, but since this is mandatory for our course I had to buy it. I didnt like the way they have introduced new concepts. From my point of view, its good only when you already know a bit of what your learning. If your new to the concepts, believe me... this book is going to make you flip...!!! On the whole, i dont really think it was a good buy :(

Seeing this edition compared to the 3rd edition, there's little to no change. Most problems are the same. I expected clearer explanations in certain sections but no change. Save your money.