Cartoon Guide to Statistics | 
| Authors: Larry Gonick, Woollcott Smith
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 3299
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 230
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0062731025
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.5
EAN: 9780062731029
ASIN: 0062731025
Publication Date: February 25, 1994
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Product Description
If you have ever looked for P-values by shopping at P mart, tried to watch the Bernoulli Trails on "People's Court," or think that the standard deviation is a criminal offense in six states, then you need The Cartoon Guide to Statistics to put you on the road to statistical literacy. The Cartoon Guide to Statistics covers all the central ideas of modern statistics: the summary and display of data, probability in gambling and medicine, random variables, Bernoulli Trails, the Central Limit Theorem, hypothesis testing, confidence interval estimation, and much more--all explained in simple, clear, and yes, funny illustrations. Never again will you order the Poisson Distribution in a French restaurant!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 48 more reviews...
statistics made simple through cartoons January 24, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I wrote a short review of this book previously for Amazon and my opinions have not changed very much. However, Gonick deserves credit for coauthoring his cartoon books with experts in the field. This way he avoids mistakes and brings out the important messages that, in the case of this book, a statistician would want to teach his students.
Recently, I used the cartoons on p-values to help another statistician with a presentation on p-values for an audience of medical researchers. I found the relevant cartoons to be humorous and very instructive.
Also, I discovered that in addition to the standard topics of estimation, hypothesis testing, regression, correlation and analysis of variance, Chapter 12, simply titled "Conclusion" has a brief description of many advanced topics, particularly in multivariate analysis.
Multivariate topics include Chernoff faces, cluster analysis, factor analysis and discriminant analysis. Other advanced topics mentioned are random walks, time series analysis, image analysis and even resampling (bootstrap, jackknife and randomization).
Each is described with a single cartoon. This reminds me to again warn that these cartoons alone cannot do justice to the various topics being taught. However, careful selection and placement into the context of a course can bring home important points to students better than just conventional teaching methods. I wouldn't hesitate to use this material to supplement and liven up an introductory statistics course.
The bibliography at the end provides a number of very fine introductory texts and other topics and software that could interest the general public (also done in the cartoon fashion of Gonick).
 excellent. October 30, 2007
this is great as a refresher and a road map of what to study in-depth.
Cool August 29, 2007
This book is so cool! It makes the topic clear and fun at the same time.
 Cartoons add little and subtract much August 23, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I have a B.S. (from a school you haven't heard of) and an M.S. (from one you have) in mathematics, and I teach math, but probability and statistics was my _worst_ undergraduate math class (I avoided it in grad school). I came across this book, and I bought it on a chance. I'm sorry to say, it was wasted money...
1) The cartoons at best merely illustrate points made in the text; at worst they are irrelevant interruptions. For example, here we have a cartoon of the reader in a straightjacket after the text mentions calculus. And there's a cartoon of a man rolling dice. This sort of stuff does not advance the discussion.
2) The cartoon format reduces the space available for text. The discussion is therefore abbreviated and compressed; points are made once only, without examples, and often after skipping important steps. I think it's _more_ difficult than a standard textbook.
3) There are no exercises! Who ever heard of a math book without exercises? We learn by doing, I always tell my students, not by just reading or listening.
I think this book may be useful to a former student of statistics who wants a review but I can't think of anyone else who would get much out of it.
 A dry textbook + cartoons June 12, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Whenever I try reading this book my eyes just gloss over. It's extremely dry material with cartoons added to every page to make it seem as if it'll be entertaining and easy to learn from but IMO it's neither. On the contrary, it would probably be best as a reference book. Almost every page has a new equation or symbol on it and I rarely felt that they were adequately discussed. "What does it do? When is it useful? What does it mean if the value is high/low?" are questions I constantly asked myself and the book doesn't take the time to answer.
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