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 | | Fundamentals of Probability (2nd Edition) by Saeed Ghahramani ISBN-10: 9780130113290 ISBN-10: 0-13-011329-8 ISBN-13: 9780130113290 ISBN-13: 978-0-13-011329-0 Hardcover 1999-09-02 Prentice Hall Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description This book is a valuable reference to Basic Probability and related problems, featuring unique discussions published in recent journals to support individual investigation. Chapter topics include combinatorial methods, conditional probability and independence, random variables, distributions, and simulation. For professionals in the fields of computer and actuarial science, electrical and industrial engineering,, operations research, applied mathematics, and statistics, who desire additional input to help solve the indeterministic business, government, and engineering problems they encounter at work. | ||
Reviews | ||
Very good and concrete introduction! I am a graduate in statistics. The textbook I used is the Introduction to probability by bertsekas and Tsitsiklis while I used this book for supplementary and I found it excellent! It provides some brief history about probability and most improtant, concrete process of the proof of theorms, many of which are very attractive to me! | ||
Too Much Talking The author of this book just can't shut his mouth! He babbles on and on about all kinds of nonsense, because he doesn't know how to bring the material clearly, concisely, and in logical order. Don't get me wrong: it's pretty good textbook, and relatively rigorous too. It's just that this book is smiply too long. If Mr Ghahramani wants to illustrate concepts with an endless stream of babble and examples, at least give some sort of overview at the end of paragraphs. Don't burden the reader with the task of seperating what is important from what is meant more as an illustration in case you didn't understand the theoretical concepts. What's perhaps even more irritating, though, is the absense of a study aid with answers. This makes it virtually impossible to use it for self-study. There are (ironically) very concise answers to the odd-numbered questions at the end, but I prefer to check my answers immediately and learn from any mistakes I may have made. I may have fired away a bit too strongly at the beginning. Instructors might even be delighted by this book; its division of questions into easy and difficult is also useful. However, I'd scout the market a little more closely before using "Fundamentals of Probability" in a course. NOTE: I MEANT TO GIVE THIS PRODUCT 2.5 (OR 3) STARS, BUT I CAN'T CHANGE THE ONE STAR SHOWN FOR SOME REASON | ||
It's actually somewhat readable. This book is all right for a math book. Every time I forget something in probability, I can go back to this thing and find exactly what I'm looking for. I guess it could be more rigorous, but I think that would ruin it's understandability. It could definitely use more examples, but I say that about every book. I'm sure it contains its share of typos, but I'm so used to seeing typos in math texts I don't give them a second thought. This book can sure help you with figuring out how to compute odds in poker, so check it out. | ||
Good book on probability for all but mathematicians... This book is probably not rigorous enough for a serious mathematics student in probability/statistics, although I am basing this partly on the fact that I (EE Ph.D.) can read and understand this book whereas I can hardly get through a page in a book like Mathematical Statistics by Wilks without extensive background reading. Ghahramani's book has many interesting examples, such as Polya's problems on estimating the number of misprints in a book when two proofreaders each catch a certain (differing) number of mistakes (estimating an unknown frequency). It is quite readable. My only real criticism, and this is not unique to Ghahramani's book, is that "a picture is worth a thousand words" i.e. it is lacking in figures - e.g. if you are going to talk about the central limit theorem, it would be more easily grasped to students to show how the sums of some non-normal distributions quickly approach a normal through a figure or two. [...] | ||
Good at a first look, but turns out to be a poor product This is a review for the 3rd edition of this book (see the Updates that I added at the bottom before moving on to another review) Here's how this book was rated 4 stars by me, and then slowly got down to 2 stars. Original Review ----------------- A lot of Probability texts tend to suffer from one of the two issues. Those that are meant to be read by engineers are oversimplified and are not mathematically correct. Those that are meant to be read by scientists are just too boring. This book is probably neither. The math is really good, and the book is fun to read. It is not ideal, however. There were a couple of places, where shortcuts taken by the author were too short, so I had to prove to myself why A is really a consequence of B. I have Maters Degree in Mathematics, so I had no problem with this. Too many problems in the exercise section at the end of each chapter are ambiguously defined. However, it is clear or can be guessed what the author meant in most cases. I almost loved that book, when I found a problem solved in the text of a chapter that had a wrong solution! And I am only 2 chapters down. I hope it won't get worse as the material gets harder. Should be an OK book to anybody who needs a book that is not too boring. But you need to get ready to filter out some negligences before putting it in your brain. Update #1: ------------ I am 3 chapters down now. Found another problem incorrectly solved. And the fact that the solution is wrong is so obvious! I had to change my 4-star rating down to a 3-star one. I am quite disappointed that students are taught by a book that has wrong solutions in it. What will the students grow into? Update #2 (edited): ------------ I thought I found another wrong solution. But after the next reviewer argued with that, I spent some more time on it and found that the solution was, in fact, correct. One way or another, I think the solutions and the thoughts along the lines in the book are not the most clear you can find. I didn't like the analysys of a solution of the prizoner problem. In my opinion, solutions of contradictory problems that are twisting, or tricking your mind are explained quite poorly in this book. If you want to get a good insight on that type of problems, as well as train yourself at "feeling", imagining, and understanding the solutions rather than "calculating" them, have a look at this book - "Paradoxes in Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics" by Gábor J. Székely (available here, at Amazon). I am somewhat disappointed with this product that I paid my money for. It looks like I will have to keep reading it though because another book will mean another $100 to me, and it is not guaranteed that it is going to be any better. If you look at other books on probability, you will find the reviews on them to be quite controversal, too. | ||