The Complete Idiot's Guide to Statistics

by Robert A. Donnelly Jr.

Not a numbers person? No problem!

This new edition is aimed at high school and college students who need to take statistics to fulfill a degree requirement and follows a standard statistics curriculum. Readers will find information on frequency distributions; mean, median, and mode; range, variance, and standard deviation; probability; and more.
—Emphasizes Microsoft Excel for number-crunching and computations

Genres: Nonfiction, Mathematics, Reference, Software, Science, School

416 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2004

Reviews

[Kate Bowie]

i hate math.

[Melissa]

I read this to supplement my stats class and found this book far more helpful than the assigned text book. It was easy to follow and put stats into English. I highly recommend it if you take stats.

[Sebastian Salamanca]

So easy to read and understand. I like this book so much I ended up buying (I took it from my local library). I can say thanks to this book my basic knowledge in stats is solid.

I suggest this book if you have zero knowledge and stats and want to get involve.

[Judy]

Having a heavy-duty background in stats, I find this book refreshingly light-hearted and less dull than most texts. I think there are always ways that statistics could be taught that would be more creative and more applied, but high school and college courses don't allow the time for that to take place. Unfortunately there's so much content crammed into so little time that there is no choice but to teach it in a relatively dry and hurried manner. I use this book to supplement my other resources for finding homework exercises, examples, and explanations for my college students. I really appreciate the focus on Excel.

[Dimitri]

Well, it is dressed up as a funny "for Idiots" book, and yes, it is funny. However, behind the dress is just plain boring user manual for statistical procedures. Yes, it says how to calculate standard deviations and confidence intervals, but leaves one clueless as to what they mean, why we need them and why would anyone bother.

[Aaron Hubbard]

I used this book as supplement material for a Bio Statistics class I took. It came in handy when writing discussions and doing homework. I used the tables in the back the most. Very simplistic overview of statistics.

[Alex Hui]

The explanation is concise and comprehensive. The book also comes with many examples and exercise to strengthen reader's understanding of some complicated concept. This book is heavily math-based. A must read for novice or even undergraduates who are interested in this subject.

[Michelle]

Good for just a little something to use as references on a few terms/theories...but other than that, I didn't use it at all during my class.

[Amina]

this idiot is humbled and still floundering.

[Doug]

Correct, but not practically applicable. I'm interested in stats for how I can apply them to my work, not in their own sake (anymore).

[Kirill Konovalov]

good introduction to statistics for anyone who was afraid of this science af