Not everybody on HN is able to judge textbook's quality, so I'd like to clarify: There's nothing wrong with relative quality of this textbook, compared to regu

Not everybody on HN is able to judge textbook's quality, so I'd like to clarify: There's nothing wrong with relative quality of this textbook, compared to regular high school textbooks on this subject. The thing is, all high school textbooks are total crap. I wouldn't go as far as to state that author don't know the subject (although, saying from experience, it's highly likely). The problem is that they don't teach anything substantial, and what they do teach, is vague and unclear. The chapter about distributions and density functions is total nonsense. Serious probability course covers all contents of this book on one or two 2-hours lectures, in much, much more general setting (i.e., probability being the measure on measurable space). This book seems to be meant for 40 hours (one hour per section). It's not like undergraduates are 20 times smarter than high school kids. They just want to learn it, or at least to get a passing grade. The same is the case with high school kids, but the amount of actual work to get a passing grade there is negligible, and they're motivated accordingly. High school teachers cannot just give a failing grade to 80% of her class, because it would mean that there's a problem with her, not with her students. She also cannot depend on necessary prerequisites to serious probability theory to be already known, because it's not, just like university professors cannot depend on probability to be known, because if one learns from books like this, it's not. Without system reform, there's not much that can be done from bottom up.