Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences

by William Mendenhall, Terry T. Sincich

This book illustrates basic statistical concepts with extensive applications in engineering and scientific contexts. The book includes optional theoretical exercises, allowing readers who choose to emphasize theory to do so with requiring additional materials. The fourth edition contains SAS and MINITAB computer printout results for all analyses performed?plus new exercises based on magazine and journal articles and news reports. KEY A section on "Detecting Normal Distributions" (Chapter 5) gives readers insights on when it is reasonable to assume that underlying data is normally distributed. There is a comprehensive example on model building (Chapter 13) and emphasis on the regression approach to a Nova (also presents the traditional approach). There are two sections discussing principles of experimental design, i.e., noise-reducing and volume-increasing design, a section on "Total Quality Management" and coverage of statistical computing. There are optional, calculus-based theoretical exercises, and real data sets, extracted from scientific studies, are provided in an appendix. Numerical answers to all applied exercises are included in an appendix?giving readers immediate feedback on their work.

Genres: Nonfiction

1008 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Aliya · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.