The author of this book just can't shut his mouth! He babbles on and on about all kinds of nonsense, because he doesn't know how to bring the material clearly, concisely, and in logical order. Don't get me wrong: it's pretty good textbook, and relatively rigorous too. It's just that this book is smiply too long. If Mr Ghahramani wants to illustrate concepts with an endless stream of babble and examples, at least give some sort of overview at the end of paragraphs. Don't burden the reader with the task of seperating what is important from what is meant more as an illustration in case you didn't understand the theoretical concepts.
What's perhaps even more irritating, though, is the absense of a study aid with answers. This makes it virtually impossible to use it for self-study. There are (ironically) very concise answers to the odd-numbered questions at the end, but I prefer to check my answers immediately and learn from any mistakes I may have made.
I may have fired away a bit too strongly at the beginning. Instructors might even be delighted by this book; its division of questions into easy and difficult is also useful. However, I'd scout the market a little more closely before using "Fundamentals of Probability" in a course.

NOTE: I MEANT TO GIVE THIS PRODUCT 2.5 (OR 3) STARS, BUT I CAN'T CHANGE THE ONE STAR SHOWN FOR SOME REASON

This book is all right for a math book. Every time I forget something in probability, I can go back to this thing and find exactly what I'm looking for. I guess it could be more rigorous, but I think that would ruin it's understandability. It could definitely use more examples, but I say that about every book. I'm sure it contains its share of typos, but I'm so used to seeing typos in math texts I don't give them a second thought.

This book can sure help you with figuring out how to compute odds in poker, so check it out.

This book is probably not rigorous enough for a serious mathematics student in probability/statistics, although I am basing this partly on the fact that I (EE Ph.D.) can read and understand this book whereas I can hardly get through a page in a book like Mathematical Statistics by Wilks without extensive background reading. Ghahramani's book has many interesting examples, such as Polya's problems on estimating the number of misprints in a book when two proofreaders each catch a certain (differing) number of mistakes (estimating an unknown frequency). It is quite readable. My only real criticism, and this is not unique to Ghahramani's book, is that "a picture is worth a thousand words" i.e. it is lacking in figures - e.g. if you are going to talk about the central limit theorem, it would be more easily grasped to students to show how the sums of some non-normal distributions quickly approach a normal through a figure or two. [...]

This is a review for the 3rd edition of this book

(see the Updates that I added at the bottom before moving on to another review)

Here's how this book was rated 4 stars by me, and then slowly got down to 2 stars.

Original Review
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A lot of Probability texts tend to suffer from one of the two issues. Those that are meant to be read by engineers are oversimplified and are not mathematically correct. Those that are meant to be read by scientists are just too boring.

This book is probably neither. The math is really good, and the book is fun to read. It is not ideal, however. There were a couple of places, where shortcuts taken by the author were too short, so I had to prove to myself why A is really a consequence of B. I have Maters Degree in Mathematics, so I had no problem with this. Too many problems in the exercise section at the end of each chapter are ambiguously defined. However, it is clear or can be guessed what the author meant in most cases.

I almost loved that book, when I found a problem solved in the text of a chapter that had a wrong solution! And I am only 2 chapters down. I hope it won't get worse as the material gets harder.

Should be an OK book to anybody who needs a book that is not too boring. But you need to get ready to filter out some negligences before putting it in your brain.

Update #1:
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I am 3 chapters down now. Found another problem incorrectly solved. And the fact that the solution is wrong is so obvious! I had to change my 4-star rating down to a 3-star one. I am quite disappointed that students are taught by a book that has wrong solutions in it. What will the students grow into?

Update #2 (edited):
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I thought I found another wrong solution. But after the next reviewer argued with that, I spent some more time on it and found that the solution was, in fact, correct.

One way or another, I think the solutions and the thoughts along the lines in the book are not the most clear you can find. I didn't like the analysys of a solution of the prizoner problem.

In my opinion, solutions of contradictory problems that are twisting, or tricking your mind are explained quite poorly in this book. If you want to get a good insight on that type of problems, as well as train yourself at "feeling", imagining, and understanding the solutions rather than "calculating" them, have a look at this book - "Paradoxes in Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics" by Gýbor J. Szýkely (available here, at Amazon).

I am somewhat disappointed with this product that I paid my money for. It looks like I will have to keep reading it though because another book will mean another $100 to me, and it is not guaranteed that it is going to be any better. If you look at other books on probability, you will find the reviews on them to be quite controversal, too.

This is a pathetic book. You can study as hard as you like, but you will not be able to solve the problems at the end of each section. Why? Because those problems are totally unrelated to what's explained in the chapter. I know most people say this book is good -- its because they're either paid by the publisher to praise this book or they're phd or graduate students. And please don't think I'm making a bad review because I'm a weak student. I have an excellent background in calculus and other pre-requisits for this course. I have aced most of my math courses at my university, and never have I gotten anything less than B in any math course I took. I have done over 26 credits in math for my BS in EE -- calculus, linear algebra, Differential Equations, etc and I got A in 16 and B in 10 of those credits. However when I took this course, the book is so extremely poor that I got 60 in the first test. And thereafter the professor said exams will be open book and open notes because the material is simply too poor. Only students having a very strong background in probability would understand this. For a beginner in probability, this book sucks big time.