As you can see, there is a lot of ground to cover by the end of this course. There are a few ideas that tie most of what you learn together: populations and samples, the difference between data and information, and most important, sampling distributions. We'll start out with the easiest part, descriptive statistics, turning data into information. Your professor will probably skip some chapters, or do a chapter toward the end of the book before one that's earlier in the book. As long as you cover the chapters “Descriptive statistics and frequency distributions”, “The normal and t-distributions”, “Making estimates” and that is alright.
You should learn more than just statistics by the time the semester is over. Statistics is fairly difficult, largely because understanding what is going on requires that you learn to stand back and think about things; you cannot memorize it all, you have to figure out much of it. This will help you learn to use statistics, not just learn statistics for its own sake.
You will do much better if you attend class regularly and if you read each chapter at least three times. First, the day before you are going to discuss a topic in class, read the chapter carefully, but do not worry if you understand everything. Second, soon after a topic has been covered in class, read the chapter again, this time going slowly, making sure you can see what is going on. Finally, read it again before the exam. Though this is a great statistics book, the stuff is hard, and no one understands statistics the first time.
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