Jun 17 2007
Statistics Book Review
I have had a few weeks to read through the book I purchased and wanted to share my thoughts on it’s level of readability, coverage, and ease. At a first glance, its grabs the attention of the readers and puts you at ease within context. Statistics isn’t scary and the authors try to remind the readers of that through out the book. They throw in warm, fuzzy happy faces for a difficulty rating (cute for high school, maybe not so much for the adult readers) for each chapter/topic.
The tips intertwined in the chapters are nice and sometimes inform the reader of advanced topics beyond the book. But I might find some tips confusing had I not had prior knowledge of the topic at hand (easy enough though, just ignore what you don’t grasp - those tips are not applicable to the content of the book anyway). All in all, the book is basic in nature but it does go beyond what I was expecting. For one example the book covers Factorial ANOVAs (analysis of variance). They don’t go into deep detail of a factorial ANOVA but I was surprised there was a dedicated section to this advanced method.
One thing I found missing was testing with population proportions. From an applied statistics perspective, I would find a chapter on population proportions to be very helpful in the business world. I wouldn’t say this missing chapter would be the show stopper for not recommending it but I might hold off and see if they are adding this in round 3 due out this year.
Also, the ordering of the chapters seems a little odd to me in that they jump into correlation coefficients in chapter 5 then skip around and pause discussing linear regression until chapter 14 (they reintroduce correlation coefficients in chapter 13). This maybe something that will be changed in the third edition (per some comments I see on Amazon.com).
Overall, the content is easy to read and comprehend, but there is certainly some room for improvement (as most books are always a work in progress). If you are looking to understand how to do everything in excel for work, I might suggest getting the Excel Edition but keep in mind that excel doesn’t hold the tools for advanced statistical analysis.
Until next time… safe analyzing.