Introduction to Probability and Statistics: Principles and Applications for Engineering and the Computing Sciences

Rating:
Summary: This is the worst text I have ever used
Review: I am a dean's list mathematics major and I couldn't follow this text at all. This is true because the book is poorly written in a very bland voice, the few examples are often difficult with little or nothing to do with common problems you will encounter, and as a whole, this book seems to assume that all of its readers have a solid background in statistics; the problem with that is this is used in introductory courses. Everything I learned in the class for which this text was required was from lectures, and I normally learn extremely well from text books. If you take a course that requires this text, either try to find another book or run (don't walk) to the good old drop and add department!

Rating:
Summary: This is the worst text I have ever used
Review: I have always loved learning from books, especially math and science books, but this book is impossible. I am a math major with a previous course in statistics and the best use I have found for this text is to set my calculator on it. The examples and exercises are so wordy and written so poorly I have gained nothing from them. I actually think I'm a little dumber after I read from it. This book is written for a reader with an advanced background in statistics and even there, I think those readers would be wise to shop around. I strongly discourage anyone planning on using this book from doing so, just let me sell mine first!

Rating:
Summary: This is the worst text I have ever used
Review: I'm a math/computer science major taking a stat course at virginia tech and the professor is using this horrible book. Reading it is pure drudgery. It is bland, boring, wordy, and hideously difficult to extract any real information from. It seems to assume the student already knows everything about statistics, as it's examples and explanations are so convoluted, lengthy, and conceptually incoherent that any attempt to follow them is a waste of time. The exercises (at least the ones my professor assigns) infallibly require a ridiculous amount of numerical computation that takes forever to enter by hand, like finding the mean of 60-80 sample points. This book made me hate statistics which is a shame because it is a beautiful and highly applicable field. If you are forced to use this text then do whatever you can to learn the material from an outside source, be it another text, a friend, the internet, anything but the book.

Rating:
Summary: This book made me hate statistics.
Review: I'm a math/computer science major taking a stat course at virginia tech and the professor is using this horrible book. Reading it is pure drudgery. It is bland, boring, wordy, and hideously difficult to extract any real information from. It seems to assume the student already knows everything about statistics, as it's examples and explanations are so convoluted, lengthy, and conceptually incoherent that any attempt to follow them is a waste of time. The exercises (at least the ones my professor assigns) infallibly require a ridiculous amount of numerical computation that takes forever to enter by hand, like finding the mean of 60-80 sample points. This book made me hate statistics which is a shame because it is a beautiful and highly applicable field. If you are forced to use this text then do whatever you can to learn the material from an outside source, be it another text, a friend, the internet, anything but the book.

Rating:
Summary: Masterfully written
Review: I've always found probability and statistics confusing (maybe that's because I was reading Devore's book), but it all seems to make perfect sense after reading this book. I am a professional educator, and I found that the concepts are developed beautifully, and ideas are tied together nicely. In particular, I found the treatment of the moment generating function especially impressive. There are numerous practical applications (albeit they are somewhat outdated) that are good for practice. I would recommend this book to any math major or actuarial student studying for test 1.

Rating:
Summary: Masterfully written
Review: I've always found probability and statistics confusing (maybe that's because I was reading Devore's book), but it all seems to make perfect sense after reading this book. I am a professional educator, and I found that the concepts are developed beautifully, and ideas are tied together nicely. In particular, I found the treatment of the moment generating function especially impressive. There are numerous practical applications (albeit they are somewhat outdated) that are good for practice. I would recommend this book to any math major or actuarial student studying for test 1.

Rating:
Summary: More garbage by professional academics
Review: This book is used in introductory probability and statistics courses, yet it reads like the authors' awkwardly written cliff notes.

The authors insist on using multiple levels of mathematical indirection to introduce even the most basic of theorems. Examples in the reading consist mostly of long drawn out, and totally unreferenceable word problems. There are no diagrams to help visualize concepts until chapter four. Summaries are wordy. Summaries of similar topics are inconsistently worded leading to a lack of parallelism, and gratuitously increasing the difficulty of comparing them.

Overall, this is a useless book to learn or study from.

Rating:
Summary: A magnificent book!
Review: This is an extremely well-written book for engineers and computer scientists. It is of an inetermediate level, copvering most of the standard material in conventional texts, with some additional material not normnally found in other texts (e.g. Bartletts' tests on the homogeneity of variances). One of the highlights of this excellent textbook is abundance of examples and exercises which provide hands-on applications of probability and statistics to engineering and computer science. These exercises are real gems, mostly taken from recent journals. With a special section on computing exercises at the end of most chapters, students will just love this book!