Refresher Book on Statistics

• sean redmond

  SSCertifiable

  Points: 5829

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  July 20, 2015 at 12:50 am

  #99008

  Hi all,

  I'm looking for a book to refresh my knowledge of statistics. I did a course in university while studying science 20 years' ago and I have forgotten most of it. I'm now at the stage of standard deviations, modes, means and medians.

  The current impetus to relearn stats was triggered by perfomance counter data. I want to build up a baseline in order to determine what 'normal' is, but the more I think I think about it, the more questions I have — mostly about population. How often should I measure? How far back should my data go? Is the mean plus/minus 2 standard deviations enough? What fallacies am I not accounting for?

  Can anyone recommend a good, readable introduction to statistics? I'm not scared by maths.

  Koen Verbeeck's blog post [1] on Nathan Yau's book review of Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan does look good.

  Kind regards,

  Sean Redmond.

  [1] http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/koen-verbeeck/2014/05/23/naked-statistics/

• Steve Jones - SSC Editor

  SSC Guru

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  July 29, 2015 at 1:36 pm

  #1815886

  Haven't gone through this, but thought it was interesting: http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/index.html

• jshahan

  SSCarpal Tunnel

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  July 30, 2015 at 3:09 pm

  #1816314

  I used SPSS for a couple years and got somewhat grounded in stats. Near my elbow I have a copy of "Statistics For Dummies" that I keep (in addition to a 30 page word doc) for a refresher. It's been a while since I looked but a couple of universities have quality on-line statistics primers.