What's Your Favorite Statistics Textbook?

Over the years, I have made use of a number of statistics textbooks. I have my personal favorites, the ones that remain on my bookshelf, but I find myself getting rid of most of the stats books that find their way into my hands, for a variety of reasons, but usually one of two: Books that are methodologically sound and statistically rigorous are very dense and are usually hard to read. Books that are easy to read are usually not rigorous.

The following modern statistics books seem to strike the right balance, and I have used both in graduate and undergraduate classes.

Gravetter, F., & Wallnau, L. (2008). Essentials of statistics for the behavioral sciences (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson.

Howell, D. (2008). Fundamental statistics for the be! havioral sciences (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson.

I also refer often to Welkowitz, Cohen, and Ewen (2006). Although this book is a little harder to read than either Howell or Gravetter & Wallnau, Welkowitz, et al. has a good discussion on statistical power and effect size. I have had this book from the second edition published by Academic Press back in 1976.

Welkowitz, J., Cohen, B., & Ewen, R. (2006). Statistics for the behavioral science! s (6th ed.). New York: Wiley.

In addition to these modern books, some "classics" that I cannot part with are:

Hays, W. L., & Winkler, R. L. (1970). Statistics: Probability, inference, and decision. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Hays, W. L. (1973). Statistics for the social sciences (2nd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

One of my all-time favorite statsistics books is:

Roscoe, J. T. (1975). Fundamental research statistics for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winst! on.

Roscoe gives the rationale and the computational approach to a variety of tests. His approach is so stratightforward, that I have built Excel statistics templates for many statistical tests by following his instructions and just translating them into Excel functions and formulas. This book is always in easy reach, and has a bunch of sticky notes for bookmarks.

And, of course, no statistician's library would be complete without Tukey's classic on exploratory data analysis:

Tukey, J. (1977). Exporatory data analysis. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

I tracked the Tukey book down on Amazon, and I consider the $40 I spent for it an excellent investment.

Unfortunat! ely, those of us who teach online or as adjunct professors, an! d especi ally as online adjuncts, do not usually get to select the textbooks we use. I have had to teach from some miserable excuses for books. In one graduate research methods text, the author claimed that computing a t test was beyond the scope of the course! The same author later talked about Multiple R having both positive and negative values! I cringed. I found myself writing little tutorials for my students to correct the inaccuracies in their text.

What statistics books do you like?

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