Randomness

I've been reading a lot of books like this recently but this one seemed very well balanced. Other books that you might think are about "randomness" are about Wall St. psychology or medical diagnoses or are standard dull opaque textbooks. This book is quite readable and is about general topics involving randomness, as advertised by the title. A book like this can't go into excruciating details about things like Kolmogorov complexity, but it is mentioned and even explained. I rather liked that it didn't get bogged down with formulas and proofs. Instead it tried to make the whole pursuit of statistics and probability interesting by following along the path of human technological development. By giving some historical context to the various developments in how people have thought about randomness, it's easier to see *why* any of it matters. I think this would be a good book to read just before taking a statistics class if you are actually interested in statistics. After reading this book, the cold mathematical treatment of a statistics textbook would be more likely to reveal the true nature of randomness, as a topic that is actually profoundly interesting.