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| Authors: Larry Gonick, Woollcott Smith
Publisher: Collins Reference
List Price: $17.95
Buy Used: $4.30
as of 11/23/2009 20:31 CST details
You Save: $13.65 (76%)
New (53) Used (91) Collectible (1) from $4.30
Seller: idaho_youth_ranch_books
Rating:  59 reviews
Sales Rank: 6717
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 230
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0062731025
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.5
EAN: 9780062731029
ASIN: 0062731025
Publication Date: February 25, 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: normal wear-- cover corners bent, page edges slightly dirty, some page corners bent 100% Money Back Guarantee.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 21-25 of 59
clear and easy-to-follow guide April 21, 2006
GrassChi (Hong Kong, CHINA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
this is a book good for beginners to basic statistics. information and concepts were explained through interesting cartoons and daily examples. recommended for beginners to basic statistics!
 Cartoons do not = simplicity March 7, 2006
Seth Wagerman (Riverside, CA)
23 out of 25 found this review helpful
I am a psychology professor who teaches statistics for the behavioral sciences. Students are always so terrified coming into my class, I wanted to find something that would make statistics more accessible and less scary. So I bought the "Cartoon Guide to Statistics."
I'll give you the bottom line right away: its handling of certain topics is better than others, but on the whole it is decently well done. While I might xerox some pages and hand them out to my students here and there, the text itself is not significantly clearer than what one might read in any other textbooks on statistics. The cartoons, if anything, can be distracting, as they are not particularly funny or often well-related to the material being covered. I think they serve more as a measure of reassurance than anything else: if the book has cartoons in it, the topic can't be that scary.
To be fair, this book covers *mathematical statistics* rather than what we use more often in psychological research. As a result, it spends a great deal of time on probability theory, culminating in the coverage of t-tests. The text I regularly use, in contrast, has only enough probability to make comprehensible the use of p-values in analyses, and goes all the way through factorial and repeated measures ANOVAS, chi-squares, and nonparametric tests.
So... my overall feeling is "meh." It's probably a better book for someone in the math department taking their first statistics class than anything else, and they would do well to remember that the cartoons, while comforting, do not render the material any easier to understand.
My recommendation for text would be Chris Spatz's 'Tales of Distributions'... he does a stellar job of explaining the analyses in easy-to-understand terms with entertaining prose and plenty of examples.
A Statistics Guide, not a Statistics Text December 14, 2005
Robert Schmidt (Honolulu, HI & Logan, UT USA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
I like many of Larry Gonick's "Cartoon Guide to..." series of books, this one included. It seems to irritate some because it has too much detail, and irritate others because of its lack of detail. Some like it because it is very visual-based, and others complain because it doesn't "teach" you statistics (no problem solving).
I guess this book is successful.
Cartoon Guide to Statistics is an entertaining overview of statistics. At the end, you will not be able to calculate a chi-squared. You will not become a champion of analysis of variance. You should be able to calculate a mean (but didn't you do this in fourth grade?), and understand variance.
Need to learn how to do statistics? Take a stats course, and do the homework. Want a refresher of basic concepts? Read this book. Having difficulty with the basic concepts? This book should help. Another book halfway between this one and a "real" stats text, for the beginner, is Statistics Without Tears: A Primer for Non Mathematicians, by Derek Rowntree, also found through Amazon.com.
 FORMER STUDENT, GREAT BOOK October 28, 2005
J. Kine (USA)
2 out of 14 found this review helpful
Dear Reader,
I am a former stdent of Dr. W. Smith. His book and class are both enjoyable and informative.
Enjoy,
JK
Great idea,not so great execution October 19, 2005
shreda
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I bought this book after reading the reviews here on amazon.Having never done statistics before,this sounded like a great buy.On to my complaints.This book is way to brief on the topics.Descriptive statistics,the foundation of statistics is only given 10 pages,a lot of which is cartoons and not much explanation.After i finished reading the chapter it didn't feel complete.The next chapter which deals with probability did not explain it well,a topic that tortures students,this should have been written with more care and detail.After this things start to heat up because the authors whip out out the dreaded symbols and some calculus which had me lost.The inferential statistics part of the book i thought was explained well but there is too much equations that isn't explained.Having said all this i still think its a good book but definitely not for newcomers to the subject.I loved the use of the cartoons which i thought was done really great,pictures really help you understand the topic better.If the authors explain in more detail alongside with those great pictures and release an updated version of the book i will be one of the first people to buy it.I recommend this book to people who have already learned statistics but need a refresher and also as a supplementary book.
Showing reviews 21-25 of 59
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