Probability and Statistics with Reliability, Queuing, and Computer Science Applications, 2nd Edition

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Nearly 15 years have passed since the publication of the second edition of this book by John Wiley. Indian edition (of the first edition this book from 1982), published by Prentice-Hall India, is still in print and doing quite well. Asian edition (of the second edition from 2001) is published by John Wiley Asia. In 2015, a Chinese translation of the second edition has been published. I did not see the need for adding or subtracting significant amount of material to produce a new, third edition of the “bluebook” as it is popularly known. However, I took the opportunity to correct nearly 100 minor errors from the book before supplying the camera ready copy to the publisher. I have added some more terms in the subject index leading to an extra page at the end. Thus, though this is not a new edition, it is a significant new reprint. I like to remind the readers that a complete solution manual is available to instructors as well the power point slides of all chapters. Instructors may also wish to use the SHARPE software package as a pedagogic aid. (See http://sharpe.pratt.duke.edu/ for further details.)

I wish to thank many friends for pointing out and/or help fix the errors—Javier Alonso López, Yonghuan Cao, Xiaolin Chang, Olivia Das, Jie Feng, Marcos A. M. Ferreira, Lance Fiondella, Ravi Iyer, Michael Kwok, Bharat Madan, José M. Martínez, Rivalino Matias, Jr., Kesari Mishra, Yan Qu, Dharmaraja Selvamuthu, Vibhu Sharma, Harish Sukhwani, Alex Thomasian ...