Business Statistics in Practice (2nd ed., Instructor's) by Bruce BOWERMAN, Richard T. O'CONNELL, and Michael L. HAND, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001, ISBN 0-07-241535-5, xxxii + 856 pp., $93.75.

This is the second edition (2E) of one of the biggest and heaviest statistics books that I have ever seen. The first edition, not reviewed by Technometrics, had more than 1,200 pages. The authors were only modestly successful in reducing the book's size for the 2E. This is the first hardcover 8 1/2 x 11-inch volume that I can recall, it still has almost 900 pages, and it still weighs a ton. Quite a lot of material was shunted off to nine appendixes that are on the accompanying CD-ROM. That is a nice strategy for authors who like words, examples, and exercises, all profuse here.

This is the second business textbook in recent weeks that I have encountered that opens with several pages explaining why it is the best book to use. See also Levine, Berenson, and Stephan (1999), reported by Ziegel (2001). Differentiating features here include case studies; Excel and Minitab tutorials; Internet tutorials; chapter introductions including overviews of case studies; boxes for equations, formulas, and definitions; Excel, Minitab, and SAS outputs; and chapter summaries with glossaries and formula references. The book also has a CD-ROM that includes templates and an add-in for Excel, Powerpoint slides, the aforementioned appendixes, and a software package called Visual Statistics. There is even a Web site for the book that has a host of additional resources.

One might think that one could streamline the textbook when all of these other learning devices are available. This book has a "more is better" approach. For one thing, the approach is very traditional, so there are many equations and formulas. There are tons of examples and illustrations. There are extensive lists of problems. In addition to all of this, it is just a very wordy hook. Everything in every place is described with seemingly endless verbiage.

The book has 18 chapters. It takes six chapters and 240 pages to get through probability, distributions, and descriptive statistics. Another three chapters and 150 pages carry the book through hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. Next come four chapters and 250 pages on regression analysis and linear models. The last 200 pages are devoted to five single-topic chapters--time series forecasting, control charts, nonparametric methods, chi-squared tests, and decision analysis.

This hook probably works in industry as a reference book. It is complete, though the wordiness would hamper its use in that context. It is a very handsome book.

REFERENCES

Levine, D., Berenson, M., and Stephan, D. (1999), Statistics for Managers Using Microsoft [R] Excel (2nd ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Ziegel, B. (2001), Editor Report for Statistics for Managers Using Microsoft [R] Excel (2nd ed.), by D. Levine, M. Berenson, and D. Stephan, Technometrics, 43, 248.