Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159590 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 709 pages

About the Author
DAVID S. MOORE, Purdue University, USA GEORGE P. McCABE, Purdue University, USA BRUCE CRAIG, Purdue University, USA

Customer Reviews

Use The Previous Edition (if you want to use this textbook)
I have used Moore & McCabe for years but am using this edition for the first time and have a number of complaints:
1) One fairly minor problem is that the new color scheme is downright painful. This is even worse on the slides (but at least they did away with the modern art at the beginning of each chapter).
2) Speaking of slides: the Power Point slides are completely overloaded; were they written by a statistician or by Tolstoy?
3) The problems are scattered throughout the chapters rather than collected at the end
4) The publisher has still not provided an electronic version of the solutions manual
5) A number of the online multiple choice questions in the compass system package are broken (missing plots, typographical errors, etc.)
6) The authors made some debateable decisions, such as introducing the concept of degrees of freedom in section 1.2. This will probably be the first day of class of what is the first statistics class most students ever take.
7) Most changes vis-a-vis the previous edition are superficial, e.g.: switching the order of two chapters (both on the CD, not the actual textbook)
7) All the flaws of the previous edition (see my review there) are still present.
8) New edition => no used books. This means more money for the authors, but a far greater financial burden for the students.
The previous edition of this textbook is not perfect (see my comments there) but superior to this edition.

Worst stat book ever
My daughter's college stat class uses this book. Two weeks into the semester, I can say this is one of the worst math books I've ever seen. This has few worked examples. Homework problems make constant references to other areas of the book so there is a continuous back and forth. Questions are unclear. The authors assume a great deal of knowledge on the part of students - one has to wonder how many years (decades?) it's been since they were in an introductory classroom. Data sets are unnecessarily large - one problem has 76 data points to be manipulated without software. The same concepts could be taught with half as many. Even the layout is poor - small type face on homework problems which are crowded together.

Few worked examples makes it a weak choice for text in a basic statistics class
I have used the earlier editions of this book in my basic statistics class, not because I think it is a good text, but because that was what was in use when I arrived. I personally don't consider it a good text because there are few worked examples. To compensate, I generally hand out a set of problems at the start of class and then work through them in a step-by-step manner.
This text, while containing more detail than the previous iterations, follows the same path. For example, the formula for the standard deviation is given on the bottom of page 40 and the top of page 41. This is followed by a metabolic rate example where the numbers are

1792 1666 1362 1614 1460 1867 1439

The next sentence is

"Enter these data into your calculator or software and verify that

mean = 1600 calories s = 189.24 calories"

No application of this formula is done and others such as the computation of the correlation coefficient are also not worked through.
Since this is a course in basic statistics, my students need to see the formula in action at least once and for the more complex ones, twice. This lack of worked examples is a major flaw in this book if it is to be used as a text. I will avoid it if I can.