There was a new release of the Statistics book that we use for this class that was supposed to be available after August 1, 1997. The book representative sent a Student's Solutions Manual to the instructor and it arrived on July 28, 1997. As of Wednesday, August 20, partially due to the UPS strike, the instructor still had not received a copy of the textbook. The instructor was waiting to preview the new edition before deciding to go with it before telling the bookstore to order the new edition. On Wednesday, August 20, the instructor decided to go ahead and go with the new edition, sight unseen, and the bookstore should have been notified.
It is doubtful that the bookstore will have the books within the first week of classes. Please do not be angry at the bookstore staff. We will make do without a textbook until the textbooks arrive.
However, since the instructor does not have a textbook, he can not make up a calendar of events, or assign the laboratory exercises (luckily, there were none out of chapter 1 anyway). These will be available as soon as possible, and the instructor apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.