Reviews for Statistics for engineering and the sciences

The average rating for Statistics for engineering and the sciences based on 4 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-05 00:00:00 Bobby Machado I would give this less than a one if possible. I had to rely on the book the whole semester, and unfortunately, it's not the the type of book one can rely on. I barely learned anything at all from it, and I REALLY tried. I went over every chapter, all the explanations in each section and went through all the example problems... It's explanations are vague and meant for people who already know statistics instead of those who don't know it - which kind of defeats the purpose of a textbook for students who are taking the first course in statistics and thus are trying to learn something new. They had a few background information paragraphs in their chapters that actually helped you see why so-and-so chapter is relevant to the real world, but then within the chapter itself, the content was not explained very well and you found yourself wondering what it has to do with anything all over again. A lot of their example problems would refer back to previous problems or even problems ahead in the book and you found yourself flipping pages a lot, holding each page with each finger on your hand. It was not very organized; any relevant information to a certain problem should be included with that problem. A lot of the problems for students to solve were also the same way. And the back of the book had a lot of wrong answers as well, so there was nothing to check against - and this is particularly frustrating when the back of the book AND the solutions manual (which has a lot of mistakes in and of itself) have differing answers to the same problem. So all in all, this book was not very well put together, its explanations are quite vague, and it was not a book that can be relied on for correct answers. This is NOT a book I would recommend professors to use to teach their students; it raises more questions than answers about the material.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-15 00:00:00 Jason Sperry I would say that this book is much-needed. It is heavy on quantitative methods, and so it does require attention, but it is well-written and generally easy to understand. Milanovic clarifies the debate over trends in global (and international) inequality by distinguishing between three approaches to analyzing inequality. This is really useful and allows for a much richer picture of trends in inequality, instead of just whether it's increasing or decreasing, which are both oversimplifications. Ultimately, a truly global analysis of inequality does improve upon population-weighted international inequality, but I will be interested to see how trends progress in more recent data.

Review # 3 was written on 2011-09-05 00:00:00 Gaye Conway I would give this less than a one if possible. I had to rely on the book the whole semester, and unfortunately, it's not the the type of book one can rely on. I barely learned anything at all from it, and I REALLY tried. I went over every chapter, all the explanations in each section and went through all the example problems... It's explanations are vague and meant for people who already know statistics instead of those who don't know it - which kind of defeats the purpose of a textbook for students who are taking the first course in statistics and thus are trying to learn something new. They had a few background information paragraphs in their chapters that actually helped you see why so-and-so chapter is relevant to the real world, but then within the chapter itself, the content was not explained very well and you found yourself wondering what it has to do with anything all over again. A lot of their example problems would refer back to previous problems or even problems ahead in the book and you found yourself flipping pages a lot, holding each page with each finger on your hand. It was not very organized; any relevant information to a certain problem should be included with that problem. A lot of the problems for students to solve were also the same way. And the back of the book had a lot of wrong answers as well, so there was nothing to check against - and this is particularly frustrating when the back of the book AND the solutions manual (which has a lot of mistakes in and of itself) have differing answers to the same problem. So all in all, this book was not very well put together, its explanations are quite vague, and it was not a book that can be relied on for correct answers. This is NOT a book I would recommend professors to use to teach their students; it raises more questions than answers about the material.

Review # 4 was written on 2017-05-15 00:00:00 Jacques Quinn I would say that this book is much-needed. It is heavy on quantitative methods, and so it does require attention, but it is well-written and generally easy to understand. Milanovic clarifies the debate over trends in global (and international) inequality by distinguishing between three approaches to analyzing inequality. This is really useful and allows for a much richer picture of trends in inequality, instead of just whether it's increasing or decreasing, which are both oversimplifications. Ultimately, a truly global analysis of inequality does improve upon population-weighted international inequality, but I will be interested to see how trends progress in more recent data.