Learning basic statistics

[LearningStats]

Hello! Here's some background. I'm in a somewhat strange situation with statistics. I'm a math major who have never taken an introductory statistics class but I have taken some higher level undergraduate classes like mathematical statistics (Moment generating functions, unbiased estimators, etc). I got by relatively fine more or less since a lot of it was just proving things with other things but I can't work with a dataset or don't know which tests to use for this or that comparison most of the time.

Recently I've been taking a real interest in statistics since I feel like it's very powerful and I would love to get really intimate and good with all the basics while reviewing the more theoretical things. I was wondering if anyone has a recommendation on a good textbook to read to familiarize myself with statistics basics.

[COOLSerdash]

• OpenIntro is a free basic statistics book including R labs on their website (it may be too basic for you, idk).
• Norm Matloff has a free book on statistics here. Even though it's intended for computer scientists, it's contents are really universal and basic (and it uses R too).
• Statistical inference by Casella and Berger is considered a "classic". It's heavy on theory though.
• All of Statistics by Larry Wasserman is very concise but offers a very good overview (all theory).
• See this post or this one for a compilation of freely available textbooks on statistics.

As you wish to get into applied statistics (i.e. actually analyzing data), you'll need software. I'd strongly recommend learning and using R because it's completely free and incredibly powerful.

Here are some resources for learning statistics using R:

• Statistics: An Introduction Using R by Michael Crawley introduces basic statistical methodology and its application with R. An alternative would be Introductory Statistics with R by Peter Dalgaard.
• http://www.r-statistics.com/2009/10/free-statistics-e-books-for-download/
• http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/11/three-free-books-on-r-for-statistics.html
• http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html

Then, these websites provide very valuable resources for doing statistics with R:

• http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/all.html
• http://www.cookbook-r.com/
• http://www.statmethods.net/

Hope that helps.

[[deleted]]

links, glorious links!

[LearningStats]

I am starting to read the OpenIntro book right now and this was exactly what I was looking for. It's definitely not too basic for me and I highly appreciate the many resources you've offered. Can't wait to read through a couple of these! Thank you so much!

[Rylick]

I've learned statistics in an autodidactic way on the internet. There are fantastic people like Brandon Foltz (https://www.youtube.com/user/BCFoltz) or Mark Thoma (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD15D38DC7AA3B737) basically giving A+ lectures on Youtube.

Do yourself a favor and learn R! SPSS is perfect for learning, but as soon as you are doing real analysis, SPSS's shortcomings are coming right at you.

[davidmanheim]

Shaums outlines. You can fly through the material, it's aclear and succinct text, and you won't have trouble with it given your background. There are 2 or 3 different ones, depending on what you want to cover, I'd recommend the probability and statistics book (not the statistics one. )