Customer Reviews

Choosing and Using Statistics: A Biologist's Guide

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

After too many books with a useless wealth of equations to leave you in a worse confusion here is finally a book to give you hints and tools to tackle the problem. Good coverage of both parametric and less known non-parametric statistics, modern approach through coverage of popular packages, keys to choose the various tests and lots of examples and hints for the experimental design. Generally a complete book which manages to cover with a sensible balance from the basics to more complicated designs for ANOVA evaluations.

This is a great, practical book for ecological and evolutionary researchers. Dytham walks you through the choosing and using of different common statistical applications. If you can't find it in here, you probably have an advanced question that requires a mathematical answer, in which case it's time to dust off that heavy textbook. For most questions, this will save you time and frustration.

The author provides very clear and easy to follow explanations of the type of tests used and when they should be used. Furthermore, he provides step by step instructions for using the tests in SPSS, minitab, and excel, something that few other books do.

I was quite enthusiastic about this book and went to evaluate it for one my introductory courses for graduate students in biomedical sciences. However, the author's understanding about hypothesis testing is COMPLETELY WRONG, and I am afraid that his understanding on many other basics is problematic. It is a shame that Blackwell even publish this book without getting reviews from a real statistician.

Having said all above, I think that this book does organize the materials in a nice way from perspective of experimental biologists. a serious revision in collaboration with an academia statistician could turn it into a great textbook.

It is sadly suprising and disturbing to learn (from the book's excerpt pages) that a book claiming it is capable of choosing and using statistics is a 100% wrong about what a p-value represents, or better yet, does NOT represent.

I was looking for a book that convered this type of material. I just wanted to say that I agree that the books interpretation of p-value is incorrect!! I can't say that the rest of the book is off. But I would be very concerned with the rest of the book with such a blatantly incorrect statement on page 3. It can't even be explained away as a typo. Shocking really.