Statistical Computing : An Introduction to Data Analysis using S-Plus

Rating:
Summary: Teachers, students, and researchers - stop here!
Review: This is far and away the best statistics book I have found for the non-statistician. As a researcher and introductory behavioral statistics teacher this book has proven invaluable to me.

Crawley explains the connecting ideas that foster understanding that so many others seem to omit. Teaching statistics graphically rather than formulaically using the free student version of s-plus, my students come away understanding the foundations of statistics including measures of central tendency, probability distributions, regression, and ANOVA.

The interesting thing is that when I need an introduction to survival analysis or non-linear regression, I'm able to pick up the same book. Crawley explains many more advanced analyses with the same care and thoroughness that he does the basics including log-linear analysis, mixed-effects models, Generalised linear models, and time series analysis to name but a few.

I originally picked up this book to learn how to conduct analyses using s-plus but what I found was so much more.

To those of you that are really only interested in learning s-plus this book does that elegantly as well and I prefer it to Venables and Ripley (Modern Applied Statistics with S). I suspect that statisticians will prefer the later title but if you are like me and want some help understanding the analysis and not just how to do it in s-plus then stick with this title.