Essentials of Statistics (2nd Edition) |  | Author: Mario F. Triola
Publisher: Addison Wesley
List Price: $96.00
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Seller: massbookstore
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 428174
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Pages: 672
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 8.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0201771292
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.5
EAN: 9780201771299
ASIN: 0201771292
Publication Date: March 13, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Statistics professors increasingly want a more economical and streamlined text that covers only those topics that are included in their introductory statistics course. Essentials of Statistics, 2e is the book for these instructors. Drawn from Triola's Elementary Statistics, 9e, Essentials has the same strong pedagogy, writing style, flow charts and margin essays.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
 awesome April 6, 2009
Evil Bill Nye (CA)
Got here before any other books I had ordered.
The product description was spot on
Good Condition
Cheap
My teacher is kind of a prick though.
 Pure Trash... Actually, Worse than Trash June 30, 2007
D-Man (Your Bathroom)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I don't know what the hell these people are talking about, but this text is garbage... and that is an overstatement. I absolutely LOATHE this textbook. The examples are fragmented to the point you can barely connect them to the problems at the end of the chapter.... it's just a worthless waste of perfectly good money and paper.
My other statistics book for psychological statistics puts this book to such shame, it's sad. So sad that I damn near cried. It's unfortunate that I couldn't use my psych stats book to go along with the current class I am taking which is utilizing this junk.
Perfect text... well organized... please.
F -
E Cooper January 18, 2007
E. Cooper (Indiana)
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Wow! Got the book in just 2 days! Very good condition.
Try something else February 21, 2006
Darkeyes (US)
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
I had this book for my Statistics I class. I've read every bit of the instruction on the book (I read everything not just what's on homework). At the end I realised I learned nothing I was still confused. Unless you have a good instructor to follow you through every step, you should skip it. This is NOT something for at home students.
 Clear and well-organized, but compromised February 25, 2005
MS (British Columbia, Canada)
15 out of 18 found this review helpful
Triola's book is, for the most part, an excellent choice for an intro stats course. As an instructor, I find it relatively easy to work with, and the included STATDISK gives students many opportunities to analyze large sets of data without having to enter hundreds of values into calculators or computers. It also contains a lot of examples taken from actual data sets; this is the text that will deflect that ubiquitous "what's this useful for in real life" question from students. A few issues, though, dog the book. In order of importance:
1 - Chapter 3-6, on counting methods is either underdeveloped or overdeveloped, depending on perspective. The short section gives an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink survey of the topic - permutations and combinations and such are dealt with in one fell swoop and followed up with only a smattering of problems, giving students little oportunity to fully digest the most mathematically-intense part of the course. If you're teaching this course to math majors, you'll need additional time and material for this section (I recommend Sullivan and Mizrahi's _Finite Mathematics_); if you're teaching humanities/social science majors, who are more concerned with data collecting and analysis, I'd recommend skipping this chapter entirely.
2 - The book makes such frequent references to the TI-83+ calculator that one is inclined to wonder if Triola is receiving kickbacks from Texas Instruments. Contrary to what the book would have you believe, it's not necessary to invest in this beast (retail price: >$100) in order to compute standard deviations and correlation coefficients; my students are managing just fine with their $15 calculators with statistical functions.
3 - In Chapter 4, there's some mention of the principle that if, under certain assumptions, the probability of an *observed event* is very low, then the assumptions are probably incorrect. There's some merit to that, to be sure (if all 1000 of my coin flips came up heads, it's natural to question the original assumption that my coin was fair), but Triola would do well to apply the critical thinking procedures exalted in Chapter 1 to elaborate on this. For instance: it's highly unlikely that Betty Terwilliger would have won the jackpot in the Lotto 6-49 if the contest wasn't rigged (probability: 1/14000000 or thereabouts), and yet, she did. (Similar arguments can be - and have been - used to defend intelligent design and astrology.) It's a subtle concept, one that deserves more attention than the cursory "this is the law, and it's important" treatment that Triola gives it.
4 - Some of the later chapters (Chapter 7 in particular) complicate matters unnecessarily. Chapter 7 expands on ideas presented in Chapter 5 and developed in Chapter 6; these connections are not exploited as much as they could be.
These flaws aside, _Essentials_ is a sound survey of the subject, one that's very nicely designed with its audience of humanities and social science majors in mind. The examples are timely, and the anecdotes are interesting and relevant. The book justifies the subject matter without getting bogged down in formality, which is an ideal balance for its intended audience. In the hands of a knowledgeable and experienced instructor with sufficient prep time, it provides very good support to a statistics course for non-majors, but it's not self-contained.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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