The inclusion of the word "Basic" in the title is misleading; it is basic only if you have a thorough grounding in differential and integral calculus and combinatorics. With this background, you will be able to understand the two main sections on "Basic Probability" and "Basic Statistics."

The coverage is fairly typical of textbooks in these areas and at this level; the section on basic probability has two subsections, the first dealing with discrete outcomes and the other with continuous outcomes. Students that have taken a service course in basic statistics will recognize the words in the section headers. With few exceptions, the same description holds for the second section.

The style of presentation is that of problem-solution and most of the problems are worded with a target a specific situation that arises in the world of the practicing statistician. The final section is a list of the problems that appeared on the Cambridge University Mathematical Tripos examinations in IB Statistics from the years 1992-1999. Solutions to all of the problems are included.

There is also a lighthearted note to the book, a large number of jokes/comments related to the subject matter are included and most are quite funny. Some examples are:



*) Statisticians will probably do it

*) Statisticians do it with significance

*) Sex, lies and exponential families

*) Did you hear about the statistician who was put in jail? He now has zero degrees of freedom.



Well put together, well written and containing a regular joke to relax the mind, this book is an excellent text for courses in probability and statistics designed for the reasonably mathematically sophisticated.