Mathematical Statistics With Applications (ISBN 0534209165)

good book by excellent educators:
The authors are well-known statisticians from the University of Florida and have taught a variety of introductory courses and written a number of good books. Although I do not have this most recent edition of the book, i did use an earlier edition for a graduate course in business statistics. Dick Scheafer is also a past President of the American Statistical Association and has been very influential and involved in the movement to expand statistics to elementary and high school courses.

review:
hard cover, the textbook is always in good condition useful content, the most widely used textbook in statistics price is bit high though, it is still worthy buying

Worst textbook I've had the misfortune to read:
I understood less about probability after reading the first few chapters of this book than before reading it. The wording is extremely vague because the author tries too hard to generalize, using abstract terms such as n, r, x, etc to describe everything and leaving you to decide for yourself which part of the problem these variables apply to in the practice problems (less than half of which have solutions, none of which are comprehensive). Thank goodness for Google and good free math help sites. The biggest problem with this book is the lack of explanations for the practice problems which differ from the examples and are much harder. The hardest practice problems are marked with asterisks but sadly even these are not explained. This is the second Statistics course I've taken and I feel as if this book is confusing everything I learned in the first one. If this book weren't required for class I'd burn it.

Usable...:
I'm finishing up an undergraduate course in probability, and I find this book very difficult to follow. I find referencing my combinatorics book (which has almost no probability) significantly more helpful for discrete distributions; the sections on MGFs (which are scattered among three chapters, none of which give a comprehensive explanation of the topic) provide no motivation and are at best unhelpful. Theorems and definitions are awkwardly stated, and seem as if it was intended to be written for a non-mathematical audience. The problem sets also contribute to this interpretation: most of the problems are computational "given r.v. x with pdf f(x) = ..., find the probailty that X=x given X>y" or other problems to that effect. In other words, the problems give the student no better understanding of the math than memorizing formulas will... The examples aren't terrible, but aren't enlightening either. Beyond that, the book is horribly formatted (as in, typesetting), and not only are a lot of important concepts hidden in the middle of a dense paragraph, but some of the theorem/definition boxes cross line breaks in awkward ways. Overall, it's a usable book, but it is too high level for non-math students, and not rigorous enough or precise enough for math students.

Mathematical Statistics with Applications:
If you have to have this particular book for a class, then you have no choice. But, if you don't, this book has a lot of problems with very little help in solving them, unless you obtain a solution manual.