Customer Reviews

Research and Evaluation for Business

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This is the required text of my online statistics course. I and everyone else in the class hate it. We've all been using the Web, buying extra books, and even hiring tutors. And it's not the subject, folks, as daunting as it may seem; it's the book. Trust me -- I made an A in an online math class after never having made an A in higher math in my life, just because that book was so good. Not so this book. If you must buy it, get Schaum's Outline of Statistics by Murray R. Spiegel & Larry J. Stephens as your REAL guide to understanding statistics. It's wonderful.... I found out about it because my classmates are recommending it to each other.

Things that are wrong with the Pelosi book:

(1) The index is less than 5 pages long, so your chances of finding a topic are not good. Consequently, you waste a lot of time flipping about to find where something was discussed (and it is that there is so much to remember that makes this subject challenging).

(2) The look: This text is not much better than newsprint. I take that back USA Today looks a lot better than this book. I'm not talking esthetics here; I'm talking clarity. Since I'm taking the class online, in the absence of a human to point out what goes where, there needs to be a lot of colors, highlighting and graphics to point you from the text to the tables, or within the tables and formulas. Really, that's all you need to know to solve the exercises, because although you will use math heavily, statistics is really about logic. But the way this book is laid out you'd have to be a genius to infer where to get what data on your own. I hired a tutor, and I was blown away by how NOT difficult the subject can be if you just know where to look for the information you need.

(3) These authors don't seem to believe in simply demonstrating step-by-step how to do the exercises. I understand we need to understand the theoretical background, but this is the kind of subject you can't just absorb by sitting in on the conversation of a bunch of statisticians, which is how the text comes across.

Maybe if you're taking this class live, you won't have all the problems I had (depending on your teacher). But since I'm taking stats online, I've had to spend quite a chunk of time and money supplementing my understanding because of the poor design of this book. I had practically begun printing myself a new textbook by collecting sites from the Web, before my classmates and I discovered the Schaum's Outline book I mention in the first paragraph above.

And in case you're wondering, the CD is not an aid to learning. All it's for is to supply you with exercises to download to Excel.

I am taking an online accelerated statistics course and have used this book for Part 1 of the course, which is only five weeks long. Part 2 of the course will follow with the same textbook and I'm completely disgusted. I found myself spending inordinate amounts of time doing web searches to find examples of what was being described in the sections. The authors only show one example, which has a solution, of how a problem is done, then set you free to "try it" on other exercises. The problem is that there are no solutions, so you're sunk. You have no idea if you're on the right track or not. There are scenarios throughout the section that are referred to further in the text, long after you've gone on to another topic. In order to remember the exampled scenario, you have to hunt back in the text to get the particulars. Horrible. There is no list of symbols in one spot with definitions which can help a novice out as a reference. One of the problems had an error and was pointed out by the instructor as something to ignore-not a warm, fuzzy feeling when you're desperately trying to learn something online. Everyone in the class is finding this book difficult. I will send the reviews to the University as Exhibit A for why they should pick something else for their students. This book is heavy and filled with hot air.

This book is not worth the energy that I expended to carry it to class each week. I agree with everything that the other reviewer said. I had to purchase 2 extra books to help me learn statistics. I simply don't recommend this book to anyone.

This book gives some nice background information on some of the things you can use statistics for, like testing the air between individual facial tissues. It also informed me as to why sometimes I cannot get the first tissue out of the box. It is from grow-back due to the product being on the shelf too long.

However, I was taking a statistics class and wanted to know how to calculate an analysis of variance on two populations of data. I wanted to learn how to used Minitab, since all the later chapters use Minitab for the exercises. HOWEVER, THEY DON'T TELL YOU WHAT COMMANDS TO USE!! When it gets to chapter 16, it just gives you the results from Minitab to populate in the extended portions your formulas that go beyond what Minitab does, but it never gives you the actual formula to calculate it by hand or the commands to generate the values shown in the results. In particular, when calculating the "sum of squares blocks" SSBL, it gives an example of SSBL in some results from Minitab but does not tell you have to calculate it. There is not one example of how they get the SSBL in any of the "Examples" or the "Try it Now" problems that contain the answers following the problems.

I agree with most everything each of the other negative reviews have stated. PLEASE FIND DIFFERENT BOOK!!!

This is just about the most confusing statistics book ever written. Even my professor does not like the book but has no choice in the text for class. If math is not your strongpoint, I suggest getting "Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics" by Neil Salkind (recommended by my professor)and "Schaum's Outline of Statistics" by Murray Spiegel as supplemental reading. I would burn this book if it wasn't so expensive!