Statistics . . . just the word sounds difficult, with visions of millions of numbers, percentages and Greek letters dancing in your head. But actually, we use statistics every day. The concepts are quite simple, and the math is often simple, too.What is statistics? In the dictionary it is defined as the study of the collection, organization, analysis and interpretation of data. The first goal in statistics is to make descriptions that can be easily understood out of a huge mass of data. The second goal is to use those descriptions to make predictions. To statisticians, the accuracy of those descriptions and predictions are very important, and error calculations comprise a large part of statistics.NOW Books is an imprint of Minute Help Press. Each enriching book in the NOW series teaches readers how to improve their lives in about an hour--whether it's breaking a habit, publishing a book, or finding a job, the NOW series has something for you. Search for "NOW Books" to find other titles in the series, and follow @MinuteHelp to find out about upcoming books.
With this small book, you will not learn statistics. Although it explains some very general ideas in a very clear way. I think that any reader can approach this book as a very beginner’s introduction of what you will find in a real statistics college level course, something like an extended preface to statistics and it seems to me a very good motivation for further study.
I like the discussion of correlation and causality, most of the standard statistics books don’t say anything about this very important misinterpretation of statistics and this books explains this problem and explains its importance.
There are some problems with this edition (kindle version), the equation for the standard deviation is wrong (it lacks the square root) and the figure for the linear regression is incomplete (at least in the kindle version).