Elements of Sampling Theory and Methods

The author states in the Preface, “One cannot do justice to sampling theory and methods in one semester, however, by using books like Hansen, Hurwitz, and Madow (1953), Sukhatme et al. (1984), and Cochran (1977), which are designed for a two-semester course. Hence I developed this book, which evolved after teaching a course to the graduate students at the University of Kentucky over several years. It contains as many sampling ideas at an elementary level as can be imparted during a semester’s course. The book is self contained, in the sense that all elementary proofs are provided.” An interesting feature of this book is that it presents “varying-probability sampling” in Chapter 2 and then revisits it again in Chapter 10 in more detail. The author is to be commended for presenting a lot of material that is not available in a single book. Of the many recent books available in survey sampling, I have used in my teaching or read those of Hedayat and Sinha (1991), Thompson (1992), Thompson (1997), and Lohr (1999). I Ž nd all of these to be different from each other and furthermore, they are all valuable in my understanding of this important area of statistics. Elements of Sampling Theory and Methods is unique in its presentation of materials, and I like it with the four other books mentioned earlier. The author states in the Preface that “owing to the limited scope of this book, it is different to do justice to the numerous contributors to this Ž eld. The selection of topics is bound to be subjective and is dictated by the level of the course. Thus the bibliography is also highly selective. Hence, my apologies to those whose papers are not cited in the bibliography.” This is of course understandable, but again the author has done a splendid job. The book’s price is reasonable in comparison to the other four books mentioned in this area. I strongly recommend this book to the readers of Technometrics.