Schaum's Outline of Statistics

I salute, with great joy, the McGraw-Hill initiative for re-publishing this classic of Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems in Statistics in a new and revised edition. The late Professor Murray Spiegel -a scholar, who wrote 14 books (!!) on various topics in mathematics-, profoundly marked my college days. I perfectly recall his keen sense of practicality. Vector Analysis and Complex Variables, among Spiegel's most accomplished endeavours, were (and still are) my bedside books. His pedagogical skills are also present in his Statistics. Professor Larry Stephens (Spiegel's co-author), who cleverly preserved the backbones of the book, carefully updated the material to allow for the deep technological changes undergone by contemporary societies since the first edition appeared in 1961. With a profusion of problems solved, this fourth edition that includes "...130 new figures, output from five computer software packages representative of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of computer software packages that are in use in statistics..." and a new chapter (Statistical Process Control and Process Capability) is here to stay. I particularly appreciated the pedagogical thread in the presentation of the subject: the authors introduce the essential of statistics in an easy-to-follow, topic-by-topic format. By revising college algebra topics (chapter 1; Variables and Graphs, chapter 6 ; Elementary Probability Theory) students are invited to learn step by step statistical distributions, elementary sampling theory, analysis of variance and the like of a discipline whose fields of application are as vast as the human brain can reach. I liked the book very much indeed.