This best-selling engineering statistics text provides a practical approach that is more oriented to engineering and the chemical and physical sciences than many similar texts. It's packed with unique problem sets that reflect realistic situations engineers will encounter in their working lives. Each copy of the book includes an e-Text on CD - that is a complete electronic version of book. This e-Text features enlarged figures, worked-out solutions, links to data sets for problems solved with a computer, multiple links between glossary terms and text sections for quick and easy reference, and a wealth of additional material to create a dynamic study environment for students. Suitable for a one- or two-term Jr/Sr course in probability and statistics for all engineering majors.
If I find an error in a textbook, I make a note of it so I can let my professors know; at this point my textbook is so riddled with "error here" Post-It notes, it would have been easier to mark the pages without errors. If, like me, you are being held hostage by the textbook-industrial complex propagated by your school, here are a few things to look out for:
- Incorrect mathematics: I have no idea how this book has the gall to say that "5292+270+246=6050" [Example 2-8 page 21]. I must have missed that identity in math class. - Internal reference errors: The text will prompt you to look at a certain figure to illustrate its point, and the figure will have nothing to do with the example. It's like they assumed nobody was reading [Figure 4.6 pg 112]. - I have a sneaking suspicion that not all the answers to the odd questions in the back are correct, but I can't prove it. Maybe I'm just too stupid to get the answers in the back, but there are literally questions just asking to count things, and the answers in the back don't agree with my counting. - Made-up equations. This is highlighted in the text as equation to know for "lower-confidence bounds around a mean": WTF is that? It's like some sort of post- apocalyptic dystopian math yet to be conjured up [Equation 8-8 pg 287] - They mess up the fundamentals. I'm sorry, but a Continuous Uniform Distribution is not modeled by f(x) =(b-a) from a Any statistician would flip their shit over that proclamation. [Equation 4-6 pg 116]
The above is just a sample of the many errors I found. I usually learn by teaching myself from text, but when they screwed up the central limit theorem, I lost all trust in this text and actually had to go to lectures to figure it out.
Beyond the errors I listed above (there are plenty more), I found it difficult to follow along with a lot of examples in this book. Some of the exercises are completely pointless or woefully underexplained. Often they would introduce an equation to use and say "We'll leave it to the reader to derive this on their own as an exercise", which baffles me. If I could derive statistical principles on my own, I don't think I'd be taking an entry level statistics class... I'd probably be with mad stat bitches flaunting all the swag I got by selling poorly written statistics textbooks.
If you have to use this book, I hope you have a good professor. Otherwise, I recommend cheating.
Applied Statistics and Probability for Engineers is a textbook written by Douglas C. Montgomery and George C. Runger. I don't know enough about Statistics or Probability to proofread it, but it seems that there are mistakes in the text. Whether or not the fourth edition contains egregious errors remains to be seen. Wiley published the fourth edition in 2007.
So here's the breakdown of what I did while reading this book. I looked up the equations and glossary terms in Wikipedia and Google, and then checked them against the text. I found it difficult to trust the book, even though I didn't run any of the practice problems. It's hard to look at a book without judging it when the rating is so low, and all of the reviews are complaints about its quality.
I bought this from Half-Price Books for under $10. Given that, I don't know how the publishers have the gall to charge $121 for a Kindle edition, unless they fixed the mistakes in that version, or if it is a later version of the text. The only problem I have now is that if I sell this book back and find it again, I'll forget I bought it before and rebuy it.
The book was okay. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
This book is awful. There are many mistakes in the book. Many of the practice problems have incorrect answers in the back. Formulas are introduced poorly. The equations seem out of left field and rarely are motivated to the reader. Stay away from this book.
DO NOT attempt to use this book to teach yourself. There are many errors and typos that will lead to the wrong conclusions. Use caution and consult someone who already knows statistics and probability (hopefully you have a good professor) well enough to tell you where the errors are.
- The explain is not clear with too little theory for enhancing your mathematical thinking I don't think this is a good book to teach yourself. However, the exercises make my grades higher because i do the same problem repetitively.
Poorly written. Too many times equations are given without defining the variables. In that a given variable letter denotes different variables depending on the equation, this is a serious failing.