OpenIntro Statistics
There is one section that is under-developed (general concepts about continuous probability distributions), but aside from this, I think the book provides a good coverage of topics appropriate for an introductory statistics course.
I did not see any inaccuracies in the book.
I do not see introductory statistics content ever becoming obsolete.
I think that the book is fairly easy to read. The authors bold important terms, and frequently put boxes around important formulas or definitions. If anything, I would prefer the book to have slightly more mathematical notation.
I did not see any problems in regards to the book's notation or terminology. It appears smooth and seamless.
The book is broken into small sections for each topic. Any significant rearranging of those sections would be incredibly detrimental to the reader, but that is true of any statistics textbook, especially at the introductory level: Earlier concepts provide the basis for later concepts.
For the most part I liked the flow of the book, though there were a few instances where I would have liked to see some different organization. For example, the Central Limit Theorem is introduced and used early in the inference section, and then later examined in more detail. I would tend to group this in with sampling distributions.
Also, for how the authors seem to be focusing on practicalities, I was somewhat surprised about some of the organization of the inference sections. The authors use the Z distribution to work through much of the 1-sample inference. The t distribution is introduced much later. I realize this is how some prefer it, but I think introducing the t distribution sooner is more practical. The organization in chapter 5 also seems a bit convoluted to me. The chapter is about "inference for numerical data". They authors already discussed 1-sample inference in chapter 4, so the first two sections in chapter 5 are Paired Data and Difference of Means, then they introduce the t-distribution and go back to 1-sample inference for the mean, and then to inference for two means using he t-distribution. It strikes me as jumping around a bit.
Overall the organization is good, so I'm still rating it high, but individual instructors may disagree with some of the order of presentation.
In general I was satisfied. My only complaint in this is that, unlike a number of "standard" introductory statistics textbooks I have seen, is that the exercises are organized in a page-wide format, instead of, say, in two columns. I assume this is for the benefit of those using mobile devices to view the book, but scrolling through on a computer, the sections and the exercises tend to blend together. Some more separation between sections, and between text vs. exercises would be appreciated.
I think it's fine.
The examples and exercises seem to be USA-centric (though I did spot one or two UK-based examples), but I do not think that it was being insensitive to any group.
In addition to the above item-specific comments:
#. I think that the first chapter has some good content about experiments vs. observational studies, and about sampling. Better than most of the introductory book that I have used thus far (granted, my books were more geared towards engineers).
#. Some of the sections have only a few exercises, and more exercises are provided at the end of chapters. This is similar to many other textbooks, but since there are generally fewer section exercises, they are easy to miss when scrolling through, and provide less selection for instructors. I think it would be better to group all of the chapter's exercises until each section can have a greater number of exercises.
#. I do not think that the exercises focus in on any discipline, nor do they exclude any discipline. This could be either a positive or a negative to individual instructors. I think in general it is a good choice, because it makes the book more accessible to a broad audience.
#. That being said, I frequently teach a course geared toward engineering students and other math-heavy majors, so I'm not sure that this book would be fully suitable for my particular course in its present form (with expanded exercise selection, and expanded chapter 2, I would adopt it almost immediately).