Customer Reviews

Statistics: Principles and Methods

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Statistics: Principles and Methods is the size of a statistics textbook, but it's content would be more appropriate as a statistics primer handed out in, for instance, a social sciences or biology class. It gives an overview of the basic methods of statistics, but it fails utterly to go into any degree of detail. It's sole discussion of the Central Limit Theorem, for instance, is "Whatever the population, the distribution mean of a sample is approximately normal when sample size is large." Well, there's a little more than that, basically restating it mathematically, but there is no proof of the CLT. In fact, there is not even the outline of a proof. Even more egregiously for practical matters is the fact that the standard distribution is not even formulated! It's properties are discussed, but the function which yields the standard distribution, as originally described by Gauss, never appears in the text! Literally the only way to use the standard distribution if you're going by this textbook is to pull out a graphing calculator and go into the "stat" section. A lot of the time, you'd do as well with a TI-89 manual as this book.

If there is a redeeming feature ot this book, it's that it's attractive: the zebras on the cover are nice, it has some good (applied) examples, and it has cool pictures at the beginning of every chapter. That's it, though.

If the contents of this book were condensed into a 20-page pamphlet and sold as "The Sparknotes guide to statistics" or something, and sold for $5, it might be worth it. It isn't worth $90, however.

As a student who is currently using this textbook, I am pleased with how easy it is to follow. The concepts are not very difficult to grasp, and after doing a whole multitude of practice problems which are at the ends of most sections, and all chapters, the subject is not hard to understand. Unfortunately, this book has entirely too many typographical errors. They aren't on every page, of course, but as a 5th edition book I feel that finding 2 or 3 errors per chapter is not acceptable. There are also many errors in the answer guide, which can be extremely confusing to students who are just learning the concepts. And they aren't just typos. There are a few instances where a problem was initially begun by using one value, and by the end of the problem they were using a different value, so the parts don't match up. And even in the in-text examples there are discrepancies. It is a shame that such a widely used textbook should have all these mistakes. I would advise teachers to be aware of this and to look carefully at all the examples and problems so students can be notified of errors before they get confused.

As a teacher of a class in basic statistics, I am always trolling for the newest and better statistics text. Therefore, that was the mindset with which I examined this book. Without question, I could use it as the text for my course. All of the primary topics I consider essential are covered and the quality of the exposition is excellent. The coverage of a basic statistics class is well-known, so I will not spend the time here listing the topics that are covered. My students could read this book with relative ease, at least within their natural capability to understand the topic. There are many examples, a large number of exercises at the end of each section and solutions to the odd-numbered exercises are included in an appendix.
The obvious question to answer at this point is,"Will I be adopting it for my statistics class?" No, I will not. I am currently using "The Basic Practice of Statistics 4th Edition" by David S. Moore and have been using his text for several years. My basic policy is to change texts only when I find one significantly better and this book did not meet that admittedly higher standard. It is better, but not by enough.

The book is in fairly good condition. very few pencil marks here and there. this almost looks like a new one. everything is good and book is in good condition as stated in their review.
Delivery was on time as estimated. Satisfaction guaranteed.

thank you!

i cannot learn from this stupid book, if you have never seen probablity before good look once you hit it wiht this book, its just so bland, they barely explain anything, im learning from other books...this book is horrible.

A basic and well written introduction to statistics that is more aimed at a tertiary level, in general. It is more focused on the practical, rather than the theoretical and calculus or mathematically derived underpinnings of the methodologies and equations used. So, an introductory text of that sort.