Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #149086 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 728 pages

About the Author
DAVID S. MOORE is Shanti S. Gupta Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Purdue University, USA. He received his BA from Princeton (1962) and PhD from Cornell (1967), both in Mathematics. He has written many research papers in statistical theory and served on the editorial boards of several major journals. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served as Programme Director for Statistics and Probability at the National Science Foundation. He was the 1998 President of the American Statistical Association.

Customer Reviews

Key Points
I notice that most of the reviews for Moore's THE BASIC PRACTICE OF STATISTICS have been written by students. I found these reviews insightful to read. My students (like the ones who composed the reviews) are not math majors and do NOT want to enroll in a statistics course.

Being sensitive to that fact, I spent a great deal of time selecting a statistic text. I had several concerns which directed me toward adopting Moore's text:

1. Oftentimes, one can find typos in textbooks. This isn't a major problem, but if there is a typo in a formula, the problems for students are enormous! If the professor is from the math or statistics department, he/she can quickly catch the error and explain it to the students. If the professor is from the social sciences, he/she is less likely to catch the error. I've actually found errors in statistics textbooks. These critical errors usually can be found in books which are written by social scientists (someone like me). Thus, I've concluded that stat books written by statisticians are less apt to have typos than stat books written by social scientists. Moore is a statistician with a considerable reputation.

2. I needed a book with excellent graphic illustrations. A good graphic will help a student understand a complex statistical concept better than the written word. Moore's text is filled with great graphics that explain complex concepts. Page 347 is a great example and has produced an epiphany for several students.

3. I needed an introductory book that included information on control charts. Moore offers this. Frankly, I haven't found another intro stat book that does this.

I've reviewed a large number of statistic textbooks. In my estimation, Moore offers the best book for non math majors.

For more reading about the use of THE BASIC PRACTICE OF STATISTICS, check out volume 27 issues 3-4, 2007, pages 199-213 of THE JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN SOCIAL WORK.

Finally!
It's difficult to write a glowing review for a statistics textbook. Even if it's an excellent book, deserving of five stars, it's treating a subject the study of which, for most people, ranks right up there between watching paint dry and getting warts removed.

I've used several statistics textbooks in teaching, tutoring and studying stats. Some of them had great illustrations, and some had a cool CD in the back. Most had instructions for using a TI calc, Excel or Minitab to solve problems. Some tried to push a sociopolitical agenda through careful selection of examples and problems. But until this book, none of them did a decent job of explaining, in plain language, what all the "things" in statistics really meant.

Finally we have a textbook that explains to the student studying statistics for the first time, what the "standard deviation of the mean" (to choose a random example) really means, and why he/she should care. Other books may try, but their language is still up there in Math Land. This book gets it right.

This book also has the great illustrations, the cool CD in back, the TI/Excel/Minitab instructions. It also has the sociopolitical agenda, as evidenced in the authors' choices for examples and problems. In a clever bit of self-parody, the book warns repeatedly about how easy it is to promote a sociopolitical agenda through the judicious use of statistics.

The authors announce at the beginning of the book that it will not include any "how-to" algorithms or practice for calculating basic statistics by hand, since everyone has access to tools that do the hard work for you. That's a disappointment. Every student of statistics ought to calculate a standard deviation by hand once in their life, just so they know how it's done.

Novice at Stats
I have never taken a Stats course before and I find this book deficient in several areas. First of all, I do not think it gives comprehensive explanation involving many concepts. Secondly, the problems at the end of each chapter incorporate formulas, equations of concepts that haven't been covered previously. Therefore, it's difficult to complete homework without much invesetigation and frustration! Lastly, I do not care for how the book refers back to previous examples on several occcasions. This cause you to have to jump back and forth in the book. Besides that, many of the illustrations have similar titles (e.g. example, figure, exercise..) and can lead to some confusion.