Summary: Great "second pass" book
Comment: Even if you have achieved a high level of mathematical sophistication, this book is a great read. I find myself gaining great new insights to basic principles due to Taylor's logical developments. This is simply the best available introductory text on error analysis.
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Summary: Clear, easy, many examples
Comment: I used this book in high school to prepare for physics competitions. This is as good as I have seen it get. I only wish we used this book in college. The author goes through a lot of effort to explain and provide clear examples for every concept.
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Summary: A Review of 'Introduction to Error Analysis'
Comment: This text is a valuable companion for students of the sciences, or anyone interested in experimental error, its propagation or effects on experiments or products. Lacking mathematical rigor, the book is great for the beginner or non-Mathematician.
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Summary: A little off the top, please...
Comment: But how much is 'a little'?
I first encountered this book when I was a physics and astronomy major in college, a major that changed over time to include mathematics proper, then political science, then other humanities such as religious studies, history and philosophy. Strange as it may seem, this text has been one of the few constants that has been helpful in almost every field. For physics and any of the natural sciences, the content of this book is highly necessary - be in chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, or biology, all sciences depend upon observation and analysis, both of which are far from perfect. The task of ever-increasing observational and analytical precision is both an art and a science in and of itself, and one of the tasks of any scientist is to discover where errors might lie.
Interestingly, this also occurs in political science and sociology, economics and history, and even philosophy (logic can incorporate ideas from error analysis, as can epistemology). Error analysis is primarily a statistical tool, and those who have had statistics will find this very familiar. The first part of the book is very simple - Taylor assumes no background, so gives an introduction to the simple reading of charts, graphs, scales and other such things, with plenty of examples. He talks about estimating, significant figures, fractional uncertainties, and how uncertainties can accumulate. How can 2 + 2 = 5? Well, if you round to the highest or lowest whole number, 2.49 and 2.49 will both be rounded down to 2 (under many normal rounding procedures), yet if the underlying calculation or data include the 'real' information, 2.49 + 2.49 in fact equals 4.98, very close to 5. If you think that's confusing, you ain't seen nothing yet...
Taylor's first part concludes by looking at the basics of simple statistical analysis - standard deviations, normal distributions, justification of the mean as best estimate, and a brief introduction to the concept of confidence. Part two gets into more detailed analysis, including least-squares fitting, correlation coefficients, binomial distributions, Poission distributions, and the chi-squared test. The mathematics requirement goes up as the chapters progress - the early chapters only require an elementary knowledge of algeba; as the text continues, knowledge of differentiation, integration and exponential functions are necessary. A first-year course in calculus should be sufficient for easy understanding here; it is possible to get through the material without this background, but it will be more difficult.
This text is designed to be a self-study for the students; it can be introduced in lectures prior to lab work, but can also be used easily for the independent reader to understand. This book is really intended for the physical scientist - most of the examples come from problems in optics or mechanics (physics problems). Useful, helpful, and a good introduction to error analysis.
Read and understand.
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Summary: Excellent desktop reference
Comment: As a professional engineer with a recurring need to crunch large amounts of statistical data, I find that this book is the perfect quick guide to things that forget and don't use that often. If has easy to follow language, and the best part about it is that I don't need to reread the whole thing to get a good explanation of a topic in the last chapter.
I had to knock it down a star because it is a touch out of date. The math is fine, but I wish that there was a companion that explained how to do some of the more uncommon operations using common spreadsheeting or data analysis software. Sometimes, figuring out how to get MS Excel to do what Taylor recommends that I do can be more cumbersome than anything else.
If nothing else, it has a great picture on the cover.
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