Good Math, Bad Math

The text is divided into chapters in a fairly conventional fashion. Each chapter starts with its presentation of the basic material, and is followed by a bit more detailed information in non-comic form, and a collection of exercises.

1. Determining Data Types
2. Getting the Big Picture: Understanding Numerical Data
3. Getting the Big Picture: Understanding Categorical Data
4. Standard Score and Deviation Score
5. Let's Obtain the Probability
6. Let's Look at the Relationship Between Two Variables
7. Let's Explore the Hypothesis Tests

The central conceit of the book is that it's about a girl named Rui who meets one of her father's coworkers, and thinks he's incredibly cute. She attempts to get her father to hire the coworker to "tutor her" in statistics. Instead, he hires another coworker - a geeky college student. Most of the book then consists of her lessons on statistics with her tutor.

Once it gets to the actual material, it's extremely well-done. It uses an example-driven approach - everything starts with an example of why you'd want to figure something out, followed by a fully worked example, followed by some more detailed explanation of what it means and how you'd want to use it. It's a very good approach to the topic. For example, chapter three starts with Rui showing her tutor a poll that her school used to select new school uniforms. This is used as a launching point for talking about how to use statistics for data that isn't continuous/numerical data.

When I first started reading it, my initial impression was "This is really silly". The whole "girl with a crush thing" turned me off a bit, and the art is rather precociously cute. But as I kept reading, I warmed up to it. It is overly cute at times, but the comic style really does help to keep the material engaging, and it does an amazingly thorough job as a basic introduction to the ideas behind statistics and statistical analysis.

As I said, it starts each chapter by introducting an example. The entire chapter is typically driven by that example - so the quality of the selected examples is very important, and fortunately, the author did an excellent job of choosing good examples for illustrating his points.

The book is remarkably thorough for it's length. It manages to cover all of the basics - means, medians, deviations, basic probability, distributions, and hypothesis testing - all in around two hundred pages of comics! And it doesn't just cover them, but it does a good job. By the end of this book, you'll understand when, where, how, and why to apply each of the ideas described in the book.

This is really what a good math text should be like. Unlike the majority of books on subjects like statistics, it doesn't just present the material as a dry series of pointless-seeming formulas. It presents statistics as something fun, and something enlightening. It shows you why you should care about this material, and how it's useful even to people in non-mathematical fields.

All in all, I'm extremely pleased with it. I thought the idea of the Manga Guides was good, but I really wasn't sure of how well they could carry it off. As it turns out, they carried it off wonderfully. In fact, I think that this is now my favorite introductory text on statistics! It's fun, engaging, clear, and thorough (if a bit overly cute). Highly recommended for anyone who's interested in basic, elementary statistics.