volterman is not good, go to childs lectures if you can, i couldn't and basically had to teach the course to myself. i dunno maybe it depends on the person, but i didn't like his lecturing style, i went to one of childs classes and wished i could have gone to the rest (had conflicting labs).

anyways, i found a version of the textbook i think the previous version in pdf format from somewhere lol and it was pretty helpful for practice questions and such.

Jumping on the "you don't need the stats textbook" bandwagon. There's a few tables and charts in the textbook that you will need in order to solve practice problems in the lab manual, but the text is available at Thode library. Photocopy the pages you need, and save your money. Just be sure to do your photocopying maybe a week or so in advance of the midterms - don't wait until the day before; it's much harder to get your hands on a copy when there's a hundred other students doing the same thing.

Also, don't buy minitab, just use the computers at BSB during scheduled lab times. There will be TA's going around, and lots of other students, so you can ask questions if you're stuck. Everyone was pretty helpful last year, and getting the labs done in groups made things way easier - not that the labs are too difficult to begin with.

Yeah! I totally forgot about the BSB labs! Like Marcie said, the TAs are really helpful and its really easy to compare answers with other stats ppl in the lab. Also, you don't have to go to your assigned lab section; you can go to whichever one whenever you need to. Its probably a better idea to do the stats assignment in the BSB labs compared to at Mills (Minitab is on both computers) because in BSB you can help right away and ask other ppl who are working on the same assign. The only bad thing about BSB lab is that you might have to leave if there is a different math class or comp sci class coming in.