The Cartoon Guide to Statistics Paperback – January 1, 1993

Good general purpose book for classroom library. This is a great set of books in cartoon form. Easy to understand. Good condition. Arrived quickly.

I'm in love with this book and I feel like it was written with me in mind, so if your math background and goals are anything like mine, I can't recommend it enough.So, here's my deal: I'm a med student and am about to start a bio statistics course. I wanted to brush up on stat ahead of time over spring break, but I knew I'd never bring myself to read a serious stat book on the beach (especially having ADD). I've never taken a stat course, but my math education got as far as calculus many years ago, and I teach SAT math so I'm not too rusty on algebra. I'm also a general-purpose science nerd and feel pretty comfortable with the fundamentals of probability.Most of the chapters started out reviewing things I already knew - for example, one of the first chapters goes over the definitions of mean and median and how to calculate them - none of which was news to me. (Ironically, even though the author probably ought to include such basic concepts for the sake of completeness, anyone who doesn't already understand how to calculate an average is probably going to find this book too advanced). But the chapter then went on to explain how to calculate standard deviations and other more advanced concepts I'd long since forgotten at a pretty ideal level.So, at my present math-nerd rank, some of the book was skimmable review, and most of it was exactly what I was hoping to learn presented in a way that was neither dumbed-down nor confusing.I was afraid that the gimicky nature of a cartoon math text might go along with sloppy pedagogy, but it's exactly the opposite. I feel like a lot of thought was put into presenting the material in the most logical way possible. It's also ideal for visual learners like myself, since every concept is shown as a picture or graph, sometimes in multiple ways. And, of course, the cartoons make it fun to read. Don't expect the jokes to be hilarious, but they're cute enough to keep my attention, and that's HUGE.Now, here's who I think shouldn't buy this book: I think if you're a serious math geek you're going to find this book too slow. (On the other hand, a serious math geek probably wouldn't buy a cartoon math book anyway...) While it might be useful to a geek who's just forgotten an equation or two, you'd have to wade through a lot of cutesy stuff to find a specific bit of info.I also think you shouldn't buy this book if you're a total math-a-phobe. The book assumes a fair amount of math background, and uses scary greek letters. If you're up for a challenge, I think almost anyone can get some use from the book, but if your math skills are really lacking, you'll have to be brave when reading it. It's not going to hold your hand. This book plus a patient math-geek friend to fill in the gaps might get you through, though. I hate to discourage anyone from buying this book, since I think it does such a fantastic job - but you should have fair warning that it does go into moderately advanced concepts.In short, this is a book for nerds who think math is kinda cool, are already comfortable with the basic concepts of probability, and are looking for a serious but fun crash-course in statistics. It's also ideal for visual learners and those who find it difficult to force themselves to read prose-heavy texts.I personally feel like I'm going to rock my bio stat class thanks to this book, and I seriously enjoyed reading it.

I already have a good knowledge of statistics but got this to as a general reference, since it is more succinct than many other stats books.For actually learning, I think this book is good if you struggle with basic concepts like standard deviations, z-scores and dice roll probabilities. If you are taking your first stats class in college, this book by itself would maybe get you to a B (depending on the teacher). The material ends at linear regression, and doesn't say much more about it that isn't obvious, so I don't think this will teach you any techniques that would actually be useful in the real world. It will however give you part of a foundation for learning those.I think the book falls into the common trap of similar books that try to make complicated concepts accessible. It spends way too much time overexplaining the easy parts of the subject, which is probably already not hard for most people. The middling material is not given as much attention, so is not that much easier. However I feel that stats textbooks often have a particularly bad habit of overcomplicating simple things, so relative to those this one is quite good. It will only put you to sleep a little bit. When you get to the hardest parts of the subject, the whole accessibility begins to fall apart in the face of irreducible complexity, and the veneer of simplification actually makes it harder to understand. This one ends with regression, and I found that chapter confusing despite already knowing regression. Although then again, most other stats books are even worse. However, usually when I'm looking for a simplified description of a subject, I'm interested in the simplification of the hard parts. I figure that if I need a simplified version for the easy parts, the harder parts will be hopeless anyway, so the problem is that I lack some important foundation rather than how the material is explained. Maybe the assumption is that most people never finish the book so its better if the early chapters are done best, but the early chapters of this would cover maybe your first midterm. And usually that is not the one you need help with.Ordinarily I love concrete examples and vignettes for explaining stats because I think it's not really a complicated subject, it's just easy to get lost when you don't have the right intuition. However the cartoons and stories in this book don't really add much, they have a lot of filler that just tells a story to tell a story, and doesn't actually help explain the concept at hand. Maybe if the material was new to me they would help ward off boredom. The humor is pretty dated but to the point of being quaint, so I can't really fault it, having indeed been amused if not in the intended way. It might have been better to include humor *about* statistics, rather than barely relevant jokes that sort of tangentially reference statistics.Statistics is the kind of subject where just learning 10% of it gives you some useful tools for understanding a few common real-world situations (including those studied by other subjects) and learning about 30% will equip you to deal with most situations you face when not deliberately looking for tough problems, ie. doing statistics research. This book gives you about 5% which is to say it teaches you enough to solve toy problems, but falls short of teaching you to apply it to real ones. For example it teaches the t-test for comparing normally distributed variables, which is indeed a very useful test. But often variables are not actually normal. There's usually some tricks you can do to fix that (eg. taking the log), but the book doesn't go into it. Or it doesn't cover the chi-square test, which is closely related and arguably comes up more often in life (and almost as often in stats exams).As I said, if you read this book very carefully it will give you okay understanding. If you want a good understanding the best thing is probably to find someone to show it to you with realistic examples. As far as learning from books, I would consider this one a warm up before you start on the real thing.