general

I used this book in an intro. probability course and was pleasantly surprised with it. Most math books I have used in the past have either been too sparse on worked examples, or too wordily confusing in the presentation. This book was nice in that it contains two types of exercises (normal and theoretical) as well as Self-Test problems that have detailed answers in the back. Those self-tests really help when preparing for exams. Content-wise, the explanations were fairly clear and straight-forward with a lot of real-world examples. As far as math books go, this is better than the norm.

This is a fantastic text that is aimed at those who are interested in applications and not theory. The book is loaded with examples most of which have detailed solutions that are clear and easy to understand. I must stress that this book is very light on theory (though each chapter contains difficult "theoretical exercises"), and is not a sufficient text for anything but an introductory course.

I've almost did not bought this book because of other complains.
Those guys who complain about this book probably don't have enough knowledge to appreciate this book and should firt criticize themselves instead of crying because did not fully understand what a PhD form Stanford wrote. This book has really interesting worked examples and hard exercicies. It is true that it need a solution manual, but there are plenty of worked solution for some kind of problems. Anyway, if you never undertood very well combinatorial analysis and probability in high school, you rather buy some other book.