This book takes a different approach to teaching introductory statistics. Stout, et al introduce the idea of resampling very early on and leave out many mathematical "formulas" found in most intro books. While their approach is better in theory, I found this book rather difficult to teach from. The problems in the end of each chapter were very simplistic and many students did not understand the point of doing the problems.

I would recommend a book like Freedman's Statistics or Moore and McCabe for an intro stats textbook.

I found out about this book only because I am a resampling methods author and was discussing resampling one time with the a faculty member of the Statistics Department at UCLA. Apparently they use it for the introductory statistics course that they give. It is unusual in taking a resampling approach to elementary statistics. The late Julian Simon at University of Maryland was the only other person that I know who used this approach. Many of us have recently been talking about doing this very thing.

The authors are well known statisticians with the credentials to produce such a book. Both Stout and Marden teach in the Statistics Department of the University of Illinois. The book came out in 1999 and is already in its third edition. I finally got a copy of the third edition that just came out so this is a review of the third edition... The idea of starting beginning students out with simulated and real data sets instead of mathematical models is a good one. The auithors execute this well. They are not doing it because they lack the capability to handle probability models. Stout has published in the top probability and statistics journals for years and has published several advanced books! Marden is no slouch either.

Also I have not taught this way yet myself, I believe it can be done successfully and such an approach can be beneficial to the students. I have taught bootstrap confidence intervals as part of an elementary statistics course for health science majors and I do think that the bootstrap percentile method confidence intervals are more easily understandable than the paraqmetric ones to these students and I suspect that other concepts based on resampling will also be more understandable to them. So I am surprised that the other amazon reviewer found that the approach didn't work. All I can say is that it works at UCLA and I think it could work for me too using this text as the vehicle.

The authors start out in Chapter 1 with descriptive data including histograms, stem and leaf charts and pie charts. In Chapter 2 the cover measures of centrality and spread and in Chapter 3 relationships among variables. All this is covered without reliance on statistical models which are first introduced in Chapter 4. All important topics are covered and they make good use of cartoons and graphics much like Freedman's book "Statistics". Difficult topics are not avoided but are marked as optional. It has a large number of problem sets with explained solutions in the back of the book.

I would love to teach out of this book.

I was really disappointed with his book. It seems to be disconnected,like a collection of works by the author. Some things are repeated in different parts of the book. There is much unrelated information to dig thru to get at what the author says he is discussing. The layout makes it difficult to read, there are lots of typographical errors and mis-spellings, even of President Roosevelt's name. Save your money.

I received "Cowboys With Chrome Horses" as a gift and got into it right away. I was not as impressed with the book as I had expected I would be, considering the experience of the author. I also thought the cover illustration was a bit goofy. The material between the covers is not so much historical in content as it is flattering to the authors buddies it chronicles. I was left wondering what the purpose of the book was more than being cought up in the story.

The first book to explain the historical interlacing of the independant American spirit with the allure of that most enigmatic machine, the motorcycle. Everyone who rides understands this sense of spirit and freedom. Bad boys on bad toys was a fiction created by the meida. The intertwining of that fiction with the rise in popularity of the era of the cowboy is explored historically and romantically. This book explains that saying motorcycle saying "if I have to explain you wouldn't understand" to both riders and non-riders alike. Easy to read, fasinating connections made.

The fact that I seem to be statistically challenged may be the cause of a clouded review; however, I feel that this book leaves out a great deal of information pertinent to finding your way from point A to B. The layout also leaves much to be desired. Examples frequently correspond to other examples in previous pages so that you are constantly flipping pages and trying to sort out what's what. I am now halfway through this book (and still clueless) and between all members of my class, we have found multiple typo errors. The errors are not just simple misspellings- most of them have been major errors in formulas. I had hoped to learn and understand much more of what's in the book- granted part of that is the instructor's responsibility, but the book truly seems lacking.