Customer Reviews

Schaum's Outline of Statistics

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have used this book as a reference for understanding and solving various types of statistics problems for over ten years. It makes application of statistics concepts to real world problems easy because it contains many good example problems that are solved for the reader. One statistics teacher complemented me on my use of the book because it is very difficult to use the information in other textbooks on problems because they contain very few solved examples. I own a few other statistics books but this one is always the most useful.

This excellent book provides a comprehensive look at statistical methods. It's a great reference guide with 19 chapters, each of which build nicely on one another.

Chapters 1 through 11 lay the foundation of statistical study and the reader should benefit greatly from this framework.

Specifically, Chapters 1 through 3 cover Variables and Graphs, Frequency Distributions and Mean-Median-Mode concepts. Chapters 4 through 6 move on to cover Standard Deviation, Skewness and Elementary Probability Theory. Chapter 7 then discusses Binomial, Normal and Poisson Distributions.

Chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11 delve into Sampling, Statistical Estimation, Statistical Decision and Small Sampling Theory.

The remaining chapters offer practical insights into such topics as Chi-Square test, Correlation Theory, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Time Series Analysis and Statistical Process Control. Much of this appears in the CFA curriculum and therefore is a worthy supplemental study.

True to its format, this Schaum's book helps readers via its question and answer format in each of its chapters. Going through these problems teaches and reinforces concepts taught in the first pages of each chapter in the book.

Great job authors! I'm hoping others will benefit from this book too.

My battered old copy of Spiegel has been a great help to me over the years. Dr. Spiegel provides comprehensive coverage of his topics (for example, unlike other authors of introductory texts he actually provides formulas for assessing skew and kurtosis) and he explains them simply and clearly. I have found his book particularly valuable when I have to use analytical designs or procedures which I do not normally use -- he provides a good overview and gives you a good idea of where you should be looking for further information. Now I've discovered there's an expanded second edition I'm going to order it.

If you are just learning about statistics, this book cannot be used as a primary text. The main audience of this rather useful workbook are students who are currently taking or just finished a statistics course; or, those who actually need to do real world calculations.
Like all other books in this series, each chapter has an introductory essay of varying clarity and usefulness, many fully worked out examples, and many supplementary questions with the answers in the back.
For those who are having trouble with a particular aspect of statistics, or in search of refresher material, the usefulness of this book is rather more variable. Some chapters have good, clear explanations, while others just present equations and procedures for solving them using various sets of data.
I find this book to be quite useful, especially the chapters on time series and index numbers.

If you are an undergraduate in a probability and statistics course I think a better selection would be Schaum's Outline of Probability and Statistics, 3/E (Schaum's Outline Series) in conjunction with your textbook. That is a thorough investigation of introductory probability and statistics. This book is for the serious student of statistics that is ready to investigate subjects such as detection and estimation theory, curve fitting, and more. In fact, if you are planning on studying Estimation and Detection Theory on the graduate level, I recommend getting this outline and going through it prior to entering the formal course. It will make a big difference in your comprehension of the subject matter.

I keep this book around as a reference and a refresher on subjects I have forgotten. If you already have a basic understanding of statistics and you just want to know more, this makes a great and inexpensive textbook. It is certainly much better than the expensive hardcover texts on the subject that I have run across.

This is a handy desk guide to statistics for someone who needs a statistical referemce as part of their job but is not a statistician, ie, performance management, data preparation or other information analysis. I compared this book to many others and found it the most comprehensive.

I bought this book as a study aid for my Elementary Statistics class. Although the book does give you many examples to help solve, it gets a little too complicated for a beginning statistics class. It became hard to sort through the things I needed to gain a basic understanding of the fundamentals of statistics. If you are needing this book for your job or a more advanced statistics course, I would recommend it, but it's one for the beginner to leave alone.

It seems now as if, when it comes to studying, books and CD-ROMs/disks/diskettes really do mix to the better. I plan on taking AP Statistics, and this book is really helpful for this and other tests. The subject can be hard to some people, but this book simplifies it to make it easy. Statistics is always applied in the real world, so here there are also applications. Everyone should have one of these to be proficient in math. This book is extremely helpful, strongly reccomended, and completely necessary.

I salute, with great joy, the McGraw-Hill initiative for re-publishing this classic of Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems in Statistics in a new and revised edition. The late Professor Murray Spiegel -a scholar, who wrote 14 books (!!) on various topics in mathematics-, profoundly marked my college days. I perfectly recall his keen sense of practicality. Vector Analysis and Complex Variables, among Spiegel's most accomplished endeavours, were (and still are) my bedside books. His pedagogical skills are also present in his Statistics. Professor Larry Stephens (Spiegel's co-author), who cleverly preserved the backbones of the book, carefully updated the material to allow for the deep technological changes undergone by contemporary societies since the first edition appeared in 1961. With a profusion of problems solved, this fourth edition that includes "...130 new figures, output from five computer software packages representative of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of computer software packages that are in use in statistics..." and a new chapter (Statistical Process Control and Process Capability) is here to stay. I particularly appreciated the pedagogical thread in the presentation of the subject: the authors introduce the essential of statistics in an easy-to-follow, topic-by-topic format. By revising college algebra topics (chapter 1; Variables and Graphs, chapter 6 ; Elementary Probability Theory) students are invited to learn step by step statistical distributions, elementary sampling theory, analysis of variance and the like of a discipline whose fields of application are as vast as the human brain can reach. I liked the book very much indeed.

I recommend this text to financial professionals I teach ... VERY helpful to clear the cobwebs several years after college!