Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics Using R

The textbook arrived in great condition, it looks new. The seller was very transparent and accurate regarding quality of the book, delivery time, and all other descriptions. I recommend this seller.

The book is written in a (good) enthusiastic style and the incorporation of R is well thought of.This book is for the absolute beginner. Unfortunately the beginner will be left with wrong ideas, for example1) page 97: on why the standard deviation uses (n-1) instead of n as denominator? "Because as good scientists we are conservative." and because we are conservative we have to err on the side of "overestimating what the standard deviation of the population is". The beginner is left to think that statistic is somehow very subjective and arbitrary. Why not be even more conservative and use (n-2) or even more if you wish?2) the cronbach test is presented without any caveat3) for the beginner, the most important to learn is why significant test is widely discredited (because it is almost universally misunderstood; it is even actually banned in some journals). Unfortunately there is no discussion of this in this book. Worse, it is very likely that the author misunderstand it himself from its presentation of the significance test and his answers to end of chapter questions (especially 11-4 a). A statistical significance of p<0.05 means that a result at least as extreme would occur only 5% of the time if the null hypothesis was true. It does NOT mean, as the author states, that "If the obtained value falls to the right of the critical value (it is more extreme), the conclusion is that the research hypothesis is the most attractive explanation for any differences that are observed" (p 237) . There are many published articles that explained this crucial difference (including at least one entire book!). In a nutshell, the above statement of the author would require knowledge of the prior probability of the null hypothesis to be known, while the other statement does not.

I bought this book for a course and realised then that I needed a code to access the online exercises. Wrote to the publishing house 2 weeks ago and asked for it, no answer. Without the exercises, the book is pretty useless to me. Better invest in the print version and get all you need.

Salkind & Shaw's book has excellent content. With that said, the book is falling apart with regular use 1X week for 8 weeks. That's unacceptable quality for a textbook for which SAGE charges $85. I would request a replacement or refund but no option was provided to do so. I'm not sure what happened with the printer but pages should not just fall out on a textbook.