Provide a short summary (1-1.5 pages) on the main features of your textbook. Include a detailed analysis of the chapter(s) you find most interesting.
Seeing statistics
http://www.seeingstatistics.com
Seeing Statistics is a book for beginner. The basic idea of this webbook is that important principles of statistics can be easily understand if they can be seen. Therefore a lot of interactive graph are included in this book.
The organization of this book is like the classical textbook with chapters and sections and subsections. There are totally 16 chapters including the introduction. The contents of this book cover most of the basic concept in statistics such as: data, probability, normal distribution, confidence, sample comparison, regression, etc. However, for a guest, only introduction and chapter 7 are available. In the last chapter, gallery, there are also some interactive graph available. So we will discuss this book based on the chapter available.
Introduction is just like that of the classical textbook. In this chapter, the goal and the organization of the text are introduced.
Chapter 7 introduces the concept of normal distribution. This chapter can be used as a classical textbook without the use of interactive graph. It is easy to understand, well organized and easy to read. The size of each page is appropriate so the reader don't have to scroll down deeply to look for something. The left side of each page has a tool bar to help the reader to locate the concerned chapters and sections and do some easy calculations. The table of contents of this textbook is in an individual window so the students can always quickly locate the concerned materials. Starting from the very beginning, students are interactive involved in learning. There is an interesting test, taking the quiz by guessing in the first section. By randomly click on the choices of true or false of 20 questions, the score is reported. Repeat this process, the phenomenon that most of the scores are closed to the mean is observed. There are a lot of interactive graph in this chapter to illustrate the basic concept concerning normal distribution. Let's take a look at section 7.2, size and shape of normal distribution. There are three subsections: 7.2.1/2/3. In 7.2.1, first, like the classical book, the normal distribution function is given, then parameters are introduced. To illustrate how these parameters affect the size and shape of normal curve, an interactive graph is used. This graph is very easy to understand and we can move the mean of normal distribution and watch the change of the normal curve. When we move the mean, we could see the curve move accordingly while the shape and size do not change. In 7.2.2, a similar interactive graph is shown, but this time, we change the parameter of variance or standard deviation, when we move the standard deviation to right, that is to increase the value of variance, we could see the curve becomes smoother, the peak is lower and the curve is more spread. While the mean, the center of the curve doesn't change. This will give the students some idea how the parameters affect the curve. Then in 7.2.3, the concept of z-scores is introduced. Another interactive graph is shown to illustrate the changing of the mean and standard deviation at the same time. Like in section 7.2, almost in each page there are one or two interactive graphs to illustrate the concepts and conclusion in the later sections.
However, there are some minor mistakes that might be misleading students. For example the example used at the beginning of chapter 7, the origin of normal distribution is somewhat confusing because it is actually not a normal distribution but the approximation of binomial distribution.
Overall this is a very good book for a beginner. It is well organized, easy to read and understand, with a lot of interactive graph, the contents are complete but not too complex. There are summery at the end of each chapter. There are also some exercises, some of the exercise involved with interactive graph. This is a typical example of combination of classical textbook and webbook.