If the book is 1/10 as fascinating as the movie, it's a winner. A 'must see' for all parents, educators, POLITICIANS!, sociologists, mental health professionals and everyone else who cares about who we are as humans. Entertaining as well as deeply thought-provoking.

Like many statisticans, I used this book in my Grad program. Needless to say, I've read the book from cover to cover many, many times. As theory goes, I think this book is excellent. However, I believe the major weakness of this books lies in it's examples and problem sets. I believe that (even for advanced texts) the problem sets should have a difficulty gradient to them (starts out with easier problems and ends with the real brain twisting tough problems), and this books does seem to do that to a degree, but it does not do it very well. In addition to this, there are many problem sets in the book where it is very easy to get lost in the math and completely miss the important statistical point/lesson that should be illustrated. Many of the most difficult problems of the book have very little to do with statistics and more to do with mathematics.

The authors also have the annoying habit of refering to the results of previous problems/excercises. Therefore, in order to do some exercises/examples, you must go back and work one or two of the exercises from one of the previous chapters. The book would have been a lot more helpful if the author would provide the solutions for exercises that he intends to build upon.

I used it as textbook in the senior undergrad. course this semester. This book is an excellent introduction to mathematical statistics but maybe too difficult for most undergrad. students to learn in just one semester. In my opinion, to read this book you do need a strong background in calculus. Having taken courses like real analysis, introductory probability/statistics is helpful but not so necessary. Most difinitions and proofs are clear and precise. The examples are good, but the authors quite often refer to the previous ones, which might be very anoying for many readers. The excercises are also very good but a little too difficult. Most ones each took me about one hour to solve it. And I feel that quite some problems require "mathematics" besides knowlege of statistics. And I recommend that you solve many excercises if you've got time - our Prof. assigned at least 20 from each chapter as homework, which was too hard for me though. By the way, I bought the first printing of the book, and found too many typos. You can download from the author's homepage the errata list but that doesn't cover all. In conclusion if you are a serious math student interested in mathematical statistics, I think this is a good book for you.

I use this book primarily as a reference. I found that important
statistics concepts are very well explained, accompanied with
easy-to-understand examples. Also, the organization is excellent
and it's easy to find and go directly to the topic that I'm looking
for. Well worth the price.