» ActivEpi Companion Textbook

ActivEpi Companion Textbook Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: copy of CD
Comment: This text is not much more than a black and white copy of everything on the companion CD. It's most useful as map to help you wade through the CD, which is too confusing for words. If you buy the CD, you'll probably need the book to help navigate the mess (there are so many things to click on each screen that you never know if you've found everything). On it's own, it isn't a great text. There's no glossary of terms, which would have been great since terms are poorly defined in the text. Throughout the book all explanations and discussions center around one case (Sydney Beach Users study), which makes it hard to understand how the concepts apply outside of that one case. This book moves along too quickly without taking the time to really lay out what each concept is. Also, some terms are used interchangeably or for more than one thing, which becomes confusing. Horribly confusing!

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the worst attempts at teaching epi
Comment: It seems that the authors were more interested in using every possible font symbol available than actually presenting epi concepts in a concise and understandable format. Here are a list of difficulties with this book:
(1) There are numerous typos.
(2) Answers to in chapter questions are poorly explained, if explained at all (one recently discovered answer was "you should have the hang of this by now").
(3) Graphics are low resolution and poorly designed.
(4) Lacking color illustrations.
(5) Formulae are given in cryptic and assorted symbols with no consistency (ie E' and not E are designated as different); often lacking adequate explanations.
(6) Does not use mainstream terms and formulas; in fact, some terms do not yield results on google and cannot be found in other epi texts.
(7) Has flipped the traditionally accepted 2 x 2 table, making formula conversion quite a hassle.
(8) Lack of appropriate definitions of terms (terms often described by an example instead of being defined).
(9) No glossary.

I have great sympathy for those who have this text as their introduction into epi as this book has taken fairly easy and readily accepted epi concepts and butchered them into a mass of cryptic and distressing formulae. For those who have already had experience with epi, it is quite painful to spend valuable learning time to convert all of the traditionally accepted formulae already learned into something that likens what is mentioned in the text. Under no circumstances would I recommend this book.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Effective Spoon Feeding
Comment: While this book and companion CD can seem a bit silly at first, they are worth doing. The material sticks with you, and the concepts are clearly and well explained. Even difficult concepts (ie. the difference between confounding and interaction) are handled well. It was some spoonfeeding, but the material has stuck with me in more advanced courses - I keep going back to this as a starting point.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: ActivEpi Companion Textbook and CD Rom
Comment: The ActivEpi CD-Rom and Companion Text are a great combination. ActiveEpi is very quantitative - the depth of the coverage is beyond almost all typical intro epi textbooks. ActivEpi covers the basic material of measures of disease frequency and study designs. The Lessons on bias-related issues are very detailed and go into much more detail than found in almost any other epi text. The issues of interaction and confounding are covered in detail, as well as how to assess these in stratification and logistic regression. Also very in-depth discussion on matched case-control studies. There are a large number of quizzes and exercises. Highly recommended.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: A First Edition Text in Need of Revision
Comment: The ActiveEpi Companion Text is a companion to the ActiveEpi CD-ROM. Although marketed as both a "general reference" and "self-contained" textbook, it is neither. Many epidemiologic concepts are discussed with insufficient depth and important shades of grey are not called to the reader's attention. The ActiveEpi Text also falls short as a companion for the CD. It contains some of the busiest and most unappealing graphics I've ever seen: 1). Black and white text with low resolution figures and diagrams in various shades of gray; 2). Excessive underlining, italicizing and bolding; 3). More than a half dozen fonts on most pages; and 4). Lines of text closely crammed together with numerous boxes of every size and shape on many pages. The text also has quite a few typos and grammatical errors. Just a few examples from the first chapter include "elements of each area respond to a single mouse clicks" (p. 3), "it would be worthwhile to review the them one more time" (p. 8), and "the Homerwork and Projects for each lesson" (p. 12).

---