I was somehow expecting to like this book more. And even having said that, I am not sure whether three stars is a little mean, since I did learn real stuff from it, and anything from which you learn real stuff is better than average.

Why do I not like it better? First, the style the authors have decided to adopt, of flippant, cheerful informality ('hey, yay, who would have believed that', 'that is a _really_ big number', 'Gravity sucks!'), that seems to be aimed at frat-boy undergraduate physics nerds - a set of very small cardinality, I would have thought. The effect, at least for me, is the prose equivalent of someone dragging nails down a blackboard. Second, the examples are a bit samey - you do not need to read a lot of them to get the general idea. Third, the examples are very disjointed: question, hints, workout; question, hints, workout, question...

This is all very critical, and I should emphasise that I _did_ learn some useful tips about how to think about certain problems, esp. in the more 'physics-y' questions that come up later; i.e. the more authentically Fermi questions. If you don't mind the prose, you might easily give this a four. Otherwise, you might be better advised to track down Sanjoy Mahajan's work in progress (the name of which escapes me at the moment), which looks like it will be a more serious, and structured, attempt to explore the same sorts of methods.

a great addition to any intro physics course - training students to solve these type of problems provides them with a really useful quantitative skill that can be applied to many types of real world problems.

Delicious book of being read and precious as for the information that are contained in him.
A thought exercise, of reflection, more than a mathematical exercise.
I recommend for all those that appreciate the world in that you live, but that cannot leave of looking it with critic.

If you can do basic arithmetic with one-digit numbers - add, subtract, multiply, divide - you can be a math genius. Maybe not genius, but you can still blow the doors off most people, and build up a healthy amount of BS-proofing, just by learning how to apply the skills you already have. This book offers dozens of worked examples, using pretty much just the math you learned by sixth grade.

Weinstein and Adam chose a format that's easy to pick up and thumb through. They present each poser on one page, with hints to help you get started. A few extra facts "to hang things on" appear at the back of the book: the sun is about 10^11 meters away, a billion seconds is about 30 years, things like that. Then, the next page or two after the problem works out its answer, often more than one way.

For example: could we create a human chain from Earth to the sun? Well, the sun is about 10^11 meters away, and a person is about 10^0 meters from fingertip to fingertip with arms stretched out. (For back-of-the-envelope purposes, you can often skip the leading digits of numbers.) So, the distance from earth to sun is about 10^11 people-widths, but the Earth's human population is just under 10^10. Answer: We'd certainly come up short.

Some questions, like that one, are silly factoids. Others have more pressing social importance. How much funding does a subsidized school lunch program need per year? How many acres of farmland would it take to fuel your car with ethanol? How much landfill area does your town need for the next decade? When political special interests start throwing numbers around to answer these questions, are they lying to you? Even if you don't have exact numbers to work with, the way you get the answer is what matters, and you know exactly what assumptions you've made. Then, when you get more facts, you can refine your answer.

You don't have to be a nerd to command a lot of nerd power. Grade-school arithmetic (which the authors review), a few basic facts, and a bucket of common sense go a long way. This book, with its puzzle-solving format, can help you develop that skill.

-- wiredweird

This book was entertaining reading...except that most of the more interesting examples described in this book were so familiar. This is one of those books where I might rate it better if it weren't for the fact that there is a far better book for anyone interested in this topic. Like Guesstimation, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business by Douglas Hubbard also discusses the Fermi approach and how ancient Greeks estimated the circumfrance of the Earth (Hubbard's book uses these same examples even though it came out almost a year before Guesstimation...curious). But Hubbard picks up where Guestimation, as another reviewer puts it, "falls short". After a bit of "Fermi decomposition", Hubbard discusses how we can learn to excel at subjectively assessing odds and ranges and how we can compute the value of further measurement. Then he gets into a fascinating array of practical methods of observation to further reduce uncertainty. Although the techniques in Hubbard's book are based on sophisticated mathematical methods, he is able to reach a much broader audience by distilling the math into simple charts, tables and procedures. In short, if you owned both of these books, Guesstimation would be redundant and wouldn't cover nearly as much.