Econometrics Book

It's not good. If you already understand what's going on, it seems like a decent textbook, but Stock & Watson often lack clarity in their explanations. This book is 1) nearly impossible to skim because of the writing style 2) very bad in terms of making connections to other theories and applications and ideas 3) devoid of metaphor and 4) bad at concisely explaining equations. A good mathematical textbook gives you an important equation and then explains it for the next paragraph, telling you what all the variables mean, what happens if some of them change, what this means, etc. S&W often don't even tell you what variables mean, and you might have to go three pages back in the book to figure out that the variable p is supposed to stand for "the number of lags." And the amount of times they say something like "and we can prove this because it's just like equation (8.7)," and then don't even mention what equation 8.7 is infuriating. They expect you to go back 200 pages to equation 8.7 (which, by the way, has no concise explanation, so you're going to need to read the five pages around equation 8.7 to figure out what it means). It's like reading a research paper that leaves page numbers without quotations--it treats me like I'm too stupid to do the thinking myself.