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43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Utility Depends on Your Background, June 10, 2002
Given any particular university level textbook, there's always a compromise between the author's need to write a professional text and concurrently make it easy to understand. This textbook is no exception, and it leans toward the professional aspect. It is therefore good reference or supplementary material for those who already have some background in statistics, but it is very difficult to learn from the text alone.As for the book itself, it has strengths and weaknesses. On the good side, it has excellent examples that use real world data, albeit largely from esoteric sources. You can see right off that knowing the material will be very useful in real-world applications, which isn't something you get from many other textbooks. If you happen to be interested in statistical theory, this book has everything you'd want to know and more. Some of the details get pretty gory, but if you like that sort of thing, it's all here. At the same time, the text is organized so you can easily skip those parts if it's not your ballgame. The layout and organization, in general, are well thought out and implemented. Important formulas are boxed for easy identification, and key terms are well referenced. The book size and weight is also very reasonable for a textbook. This is attained by very concise, mathematical language. Also, a useful CD is included with the text, containing all the data used in the exercises (various program formats) so you don't have to type it all in manually. All-important tables are located in the back of the book, where you can always find them. Additionally, the appendix section has answers to the odd-numbered exercises. It's not that much of a problem that you only have half the solutions, because concurrent problems are usually similar. Downsides to the text include the language, which is highly technical, relying heavily on symbols, terminology, and acronyms. Of course, statistics in general is like this, but this book really forces you to learn this rather distasteful aspect of the field. Anyway, it could certainly be more user-friendly, although as such it might be less concise. For those who are well accustomed to such things (e.g. statisticians, mathematicians, military people) the material might be an easy thing to pick up. For others, it can be frustrating when you have to flip back a few hundred pages to remind yourself what a particular Greek alphabet was supposed to represent. Personally, I feel a table of all the symbols with a brief description of each would have been a very welcome addition to the appendix. Though the exercises are generally well done and challenging, I do have some issues with them. From time to time, one would refer to a problem or data set from way back in the textbook- with no executive summary. It would have been nice to be able to see what was being asked without flipping back hundreds of pages. Additionally, the answers provided in the appendix are often nearly useless, since a terse numerical answer says little about how you might arrive at it. For this purpose there is a solutions manual available, but you might be disinclined to pay for it. The most prominent difficulty with the text- and I know it's not exclusively mine- is the simple fact that it is a professional work. If you have no knowledge of statistics beforehand, it can be an extremely difficult read. For a while I tried to browse the text before lectures, but I found that it wasn't worth the effort. It took so long to plow through to the 'moral of the story' that I ended up just using the book for review. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have an excellent statistics professor (the author himself) and so was able to pick up the concepts by simply going to class. If, in the admittedly improbable event that you're new to statistics and are looking for an extra book to make up for a poor instructor, you might want to look at a different one. If you already know something about statistics and want a useful reference, then this is your resource.
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