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davidemerson's review against another edition
informative
fast-paced
4.0
An excellent book on quantitative measurement and statistical methods. Lots of fluff in the language, but the genuine content is valuable and well written.
atticus13's review
3.0
The fundamental idea of this book is that one does not need immensely nuanced statistical skills to play a little "fast and loose" in the business world. There's a rift between business decisions and academic statistics and this rift exists because academic statisticians are just too thorough to be efficient enough for major executive business decisions and executives have no real understanding of statistics. I agree with this idea. Michael Hubbard wants to show you that you can take a simple toolkit and apply it to big problems to get a "good enough" answer. It's like applying LEAN startup thinking to statistics. Iterate, iterate, and iterate.
The problem is, you cannot properly play fast and loose unless you have a fundamental understanding of the mechanics of whatever it is you're playing fast and loose with. Hubbard could have overcome this by adding to the book some basic chapters on fundamental statistics, but instead he has these horrific chapters in the end of the book that are part memoir, part case studies and part math textbook. Random terms are thrown in without context and nothing is notated in a reference-able way. Rather than turning to this book to supplement a weak understanding of stats, come to this book AFTER you've gotten a solid education in statistics and learn from Hubbard's immense knowledge and experience on how to apply your new-found skill in an iterative and LEAN way.
The problem is, you cannot properly play fast and loose unless you have a fundamental understanding of the mechanics of whatever it is you're playing fast and loose with. Hubbard could have overcome this by adding to the book some basic chapters on fundamental statistics, but instead he has these horrific chapters in the end of the book that are part memoir, part case studies and part math textbook. Random terms are thrown in without context and nothing is notated in a reference-able way. Rather than turning to this book to supplement a weak understanding of stats, come to this book AFTER you've gotten a solid education in statistics and learn from Hubbard's immense knowledge and experience on how to apply your new-found skill in an iterative and LEAN way.
matthew_p's review
4.0
Excellent techniques but, like most business books, spent a lot of time (and pages) establishing credibility.
matthew_p's review against another edition
4.0
First, this was just a good read on how to get started on quantifying and managing information security risk. If your organization needs some improvement in this area, start here.
Secondly, apparently I'm late to the game because this book is now on a dozen desks in my office and nobody told me it was all the rage!
Secondly, apparently I'm late to the game because this book is now on a dozen desks in my office and nobody told me it was all the rage!
garyboland's review against another edition
5.0
A truly brilliant book. Game changing in the way that it exposes that their are not knowns and unknows, just degrees of known (there is literally nothing that you cannot make upperbound and lowerbound guess on). Cannot recommend this book enough
jtone's review against another edition
4.0
I plan to try the methods described in this book to see if I can measure my department's performance. It should be an interesting experiment.