A whistle-stop tour of statistics
In a consequent package I got from CRC Press last month for CHANCE, there was this short book by Brian S. Everitt, A whistle-stop tour of statistics… Nice cover! The book is like an introductory undergraduate statistics course, except that it is much much terser and shorter, using 200 pages in A5 format with plenty of pictures. (It could also have been called a primer or a guidebook.) The table of contents is as follows
Some basics and describing data
Probability
Estimation
Inference
Analysis of variance models
Linear regression models
Logistic regression and the generalized linear model
Survival analysis
Longitudinal data and their analysis
Multivariate data and their analysis
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the book, except that… I cannot fathom its purpose! Nor its readership. Again, it is way too short and terse to be used in an undergraduate course or for self-study. And it does not bring a new light on those standard topics when compared with most of introductory statistics books, being mostly traditional (even though it briefly mentions Bayesian inference on pp. 88-89). While the book is itself a summary of statistical methodology, it still finds room for a summary of the current notions at the end of each chapter. So I thus remain completely puzzled by the point in publishing A whistle-stop tour of statistics..!
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