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| Introduction to the Practice of Statistics w/CD-ROM | 
| Authors: David S. Moore, George P. Mccabe
Publisher: W. H. Freeman
Category: Book
Buy Used: $3.49
New (44) from $29.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 908
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 5th
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 896
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.1
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 8.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0716764008
Dewey Decimal Number: 371
EAN: 9780716764007
ASIN: 0716764008
Publication Date: February 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Textbook 5th Student edition. CD NOT INCLUDED. Moderate dirt, wear, wrinkling, or creasing on cover and spine. Fair binding. May have a few loose pages. NO apparent missing pages. Heavy staining or wrinkling from liquid damage. Does not affect the text. Light writing and highlighting. Some pages may be stuck together, but can be separated without damaging text. tg ct JG All of our books are Legally copy righted US student editions
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Product Description
With its focus on data analysis, statistical reasoning, and the way statisticians actually work, Introduction to the Practice of Statistics (IPS) helped bring the power of critical thinking and practical applications to today's statistics classroom. Unlike more traditional “plug and chug” /formula driven texts, IPS de-emphasizes probability and gives students a deeper understanding of statistics.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 A great book with a very down to earth approach to statistical inference August 5, 2008
There are many statistics books out there, but this one really stands out. The style is extremely clear, the examples pertinent and the author constantly brings the reader to the basics, no non-sense, showing why and how particular items are important. Practitioners will find this book especially useful since it deals mainly with statistical inference (tests) and gives a great amount of real life examples.
The experienced statistician should stay away (if looking for an advanced textbook) since this book does not go into deep mathematical or theoretical details (the necessary minimum is provided).
A quick peek at the toc gives a reliable idea of its content.
 Sent extremely late July 30, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I ordered this book for a summer school class, and it was not even sent out until three weeks after I ordered it. I received the book five weeks after I orginally ordered it, and two weeks too late for my class. I was and still am very annoyed by the seller.
Truly awful statistics textbook July 15, 2008
I never understood why this textbook has enjoyed such enduring popularity. This book presents statistics as nothing more than one formula after another, rarely stopping to justify any of them, and when it does try to explain something, it inevitably resorts to long and convoluted exposition. This is my main gripe with this textbook -- there is too much text and not enough math. I realize that this book is not concerned with the theoretical aspects of statistics, but in order to understand and apply statistics at even the most basic level, a certain facility with math is necessary. This book does its utmost to strip statistics of math, replacing it with long-winded verbal explanations wherever possible. Thus the book ends up being twice as long than perhaps it needs to be. (I've seen other introductory stat textbooks that cover everything in this textbook and more in 500 pages or less.)
I realize that many students taking introductory statistics are averse to math. But by replacing the math with exposition, this book does statistics a great disservice. Many people enjoy reading long-winded 1000-page novels because there is often good prose and a good story to be had; long-winded 1000-page statistics textbooks, on the other hand, are a chore for anybody to read because -- let's face it -- it just isn't possible to talk about sampling distributions like Tolstoy tells Anna Karenina. (Disclaimer: Sampling distributions can be every bit as exciting as Tolstoy, but it usually isn't much fun to read about them!) When books like these try to teach statistics as if it were a narrative, is it any wonder that so many students claim to find statistics boring?
One thing that this book does well is deceive readers into thinking that they know statistics, but it only breeds more confusion and misconceptions that will hurt students if they ever take another statistics class. For example, the book presents the concept of normal distributions before it even mentions probability. I suppose students enjoy seeing this topic early in the course because they've heard of the normal distribution and associate statistics with it. But the normal distribution is fundamentally a phenomenon of probability, and it applies to data only insofar as it is one of the many probability models for distribution of a given set of data. Yet students are asked to find normal probabilities before they are even introduced to what probability is. The statistics department at my school has griped that the students don't understand the difference between probability distribution and distribution of a set of data. Maybe students wouldn't have this problem if the intro classes didn't use a textbook that blurs the distinction between the two! In my own experience teaching with this text, I have encountered another fundamental misunderstanding that stems from introducing normal distributions so early on -- some students start calling ANY bell-shaped and symmetric distribution "normal."
As if that were not enough, the book neglects to mention one of the most important distinctions in all of probability/statistics -- that of discrete vs. continuous random variables. How are students supposed to understand what it means for a random variable to be normally distributed when everything they have studied about random variables has been discrete?
To compound the lousy presentation of material, the authors have somehow managed to come up with the least interesting problems possible for the exercises. Whereas most statistics textbooks select their data sets from actual experiments and studies, it really seems in some of the exercises that the authors fabricated a bunch of numbers for students to punch into their calculator/MiniTab.
If you are a professor or AP Stats teacher, please do your students a favor and look elsewhere for a suitable textbook. In my experience, McClave/Sincich treats statistics correctly (with separate chapters for discrete and continuous random variables!) and has interesting problems to boot. But my experience with statistics textbooks is limited, and there may be better books out there. Shop around, but chances are that you won't find a worse textbook than this one. If you are a student, you have my sympathies. Good luck working with this textbook, and don't feel bad if statistics makes less sense after reading this textbook than before.
another well-written and popular text by David Moore March 30, 2008
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
David Moore is a Professor of Statistics at Purdue University. He is both a great teacjer and a scholar. In addition to one or two well-written advanced books he has written a number of high quality introductory statistics books and has led the movement toward AP statistics in the high schools and active learning methods for tesching statistics at the elementary, middle and high school levels as well as at the universities.
This book is a new edition of his highly successful introductory text. This is only slightly more advanced than the text "The Basic Practice of Statistics" also written by Moore. This edition can only be as good or better than the one U have read. The inclusion of a CD for use in the course can only be a significant edition to this applied text.
 Clear as mud February 23, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'll grant you that this is my first time in any kind of statistics class so perhaps my complaint should be leveled more at statistics in general rather than at this particular book. My complaint, specifically, is that the way this book presents statistics and explanations is so sparse and inadequate as to be nearly useless. It has plentiful exercises--which I like (because, as other reviews have said, repetition is the only way to learn a new language or skill)--but it's woefully inadequate in how it goes about conveying the foreign concepts of statistics to a newcomer. It expects a student (me, in this case) to understand all the complexities of a concept after having read the paragraph or two of explanation given in the textbook. Consequently, all the wonderful examples are useless because the book doesn't grant the comprehension to do the exercises. I've already bought one more statistics textbook to supplement this one (which is, unfortunately, used in my stats class) and will probably be buying another one. I'm desperate for a decent stats textbook because this one isn't remotely decent. Get it for many examples to work (though I don't understand why a text book would provide exercises without providing a key for said exercises), but not for learning the concepts. This book provides the key to HALF the exercises...why?
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