Intro Stats (3rd Edition)

 (34 customer reviews)

This is a well-organized, nicely put-together textbook, with lots of step-by-step examples to give you a good base of understanding and lots of problems and section reviews to allow you to apply and extend that understanding. If you're intimidated by math, this textbook will go a long way toward easing your fears, and if you're a lover of math, you'll learn a lot about Statistics and be highly entertained along the way.
Although an introductory calculus class was a prerequisite for the course I took using this text, the only time integrals and complicated formulas showed up was in footnotes or the occasional homework problem. In general, the book aims to teach through real world examples and applications, not through pages of potentially intimidating to-be-memorized equations and formulas. As a result, the "math" parts of the book (you can't really do Statistics without math) are hidden, so that you are often using "math" without realizing it.
I...Read more

This actually is a fantastic textbook. De Veaux and Velleman are realists; they know that you don't want to read everything. They have taken the liberty of highlighting important parts of their explanations. (They also highlighted a bit of advice recommending that students read more than just the highlighted text-they have a good sense of humor that shows up throughout the book.) The authors also provide a fantastic summary of "Key Concepts" at the end of each chapter. Also, they have clearly gone to great lengths to find interesting topics to use in their exercises. There are very few mind numbing homework problems. You know the type: "In the following data about the most frequently purchased brand of toenail clippers..."
How about a question like this: What is the likelihood that reading a randomly selected example question will be more painful that attempting to swallow the textbook it came from? If you're selecting from <u>Intro Stats</u>, put down your fork...Read more

As a long-time professor of statistics with experience teaching introductory statistics to hundreds of students over many years, using many textbooks, I want to go on record that this is a wonderful book. The authors are hugely prepared, both as far as the statistical concepts and methods are concerned, but also with respect to instruction. They have learned what to do, and what not to do; they have made difficult concepts as simple as is they can (remembering Einstein's great principle: every explanation should be as simple as possible, but not simpler). All the key concepts and methods that really need to be covered are here, and the book is tied to the real world by repeated references to meaningful applied problems. For years I despaired that I would never find a book that had the great qualities I wanted to see in a book that introduces statistics, but this book comes as close as any I have seen. You won't go wrong using this book to learn statistics, nor to teach it!