Robert R. Sokal

Somewhere over the years I lost my Biometry Textbooks that I'd used at University and although statistics is not something that I normally read for recreation, I did miss the old book because I'd spent so much time becoming familiar with it. (I think it got water damaged whilst travelling between countries). Anyway, I found this in a charity bookshop and it looked like it covered the ground that I would be interested in and was about 10 years more up to date. So it covers all the usual elementary statistics and moves very quickly into analysis of variance: one way, nested, two way and multiway analysis of variance. Then into linear regression, correlation and multiple and curvilinear regression. And then into material that I'm not familiar with: Analysis of frequencies and a collection of miscellaneous methods including something called "the Jackknife".
Spoiler alert: I haven't read the book.....it's not really bedtime reading. But is seems very practical and the authors are clearly involved teachers so they give lots of biological examples. A lot from agricultural research but about half from other sorts of scientific research.
I'm sure that I would benefit from studying it in some detail but suspect that I'm just not going to get around to doing that ....unless I have some relevant data that needs analysing. However, It does seem to be rather out of date. Yes, I was using Fortran IV when I was using statistics ...but these days... don't think anyone uses Fortran. And in 1981 when this version was published, The personal computer revolution had barely commenced. So no discussion at all about using computers in any comprehensive way. (Yes there is a mention of analysis by computer but I suspect it was more or less like I used to do; you enter your data on sheets; plus sub routines ......it's entered by somebody else (an expert) as punched cards and the cards are fed into the computer .......which promptly spits out an error message so you go through the whole routine gain after correcting for the missing bracket.....etc., etc. Ok it's an old fashioned book but still good content. I give it 4 stars.… (mehr)