20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent practical tool for learning; NOT sexist., October 27, 1999
By A Customer
This book, like so many other Schaum's outlines, helped me years ago by giving me hundreds of problems and solutions.
Now, I use this book as a supplement to college courses i teach in probability theory. It is the best book for simplifying problems that confuse many students. It helps make the material far more accessible.
One person claimed the book was sexist; the book is ACCURATE. In every college i have any knowledge of, there are many more men than women in the math and phsyics courses. This is how the current world is. Bottom line: this book will help women and men learn probability theory.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You'll excel!!!, October 22, 2001
This review is from: Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Probability (2nd Edition) (Paperback)
I picked up this book upon a recommendation from my college bookstore. In class, we're using "A First Course in Probability" by Sheldon Ross. The book is too dry and made me fail the first test. Upon picking up this book though, I was able to do a lot of practice problems, was able to understand most concepts but more importantly, pass the class with an "A". I would recommend this book to anyone struggling in their probability class.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too basic - non standard, March 9, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Probability (2nd Edition) (Paperback)
I picked this book without realizing that it is meant for high school students. Thus the book is very basic and really only goes into Gaussian distributions.
My real complaint with this book is the notations used to represent some equations are non-standard. As well it is quite heavy on the mathematical shortcuts like
S={x:x is N C Z C R} which really means S is equal to x, such that x is a natural/positive integer contained in all integers positive or negative which is contained in all real numbers. (Whew!) The book seems to do this often. (trying to impress rather than teach?)
I felt its definition of random variables was poor and quite vague, and what little time is spent on them is single discrete random variables. Also the mathematical shortcuts are a nuisance since the non-standard notation being used, I found myself going back and wonder what capital Gamma and Phi were defined as.
There are millions of (easy) examples in this book, and as a graduate student this book had little to offer me except some frustration. I gave it 3 stars since I think that when I was in high school, the mathematical notation would have intimidated me, but it does have some useful examples. (I most likely would have given it 1 star back then)
If you are looking for a better book (Schaums) than this, try
Schaum's Outline of Probability, Random Variables, and Random Processes. This book covers everything up to multiple R.V's, and random processes, moment gen functions etc etc.
This book is just too basic and too complicated at the same time, but does have some value.
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