Good textbooks for statistics

[Tom Hsiung]

Hello, everyone

I am new to statistics and Stats. To be good at Stata, one should first be good at statistics. I am a pharmacy student and I do a lot of statistical jobs, some of which are relative to general statistics, others are to time-series (survival analysis), and meta analysis. Now I have read one very good junior textbook of statistics, Weiss's Introductory Statistics 10e. However, I want to learn more about statistics, or advanced statistics. You guys could suggest me some good textbooks? My expertise is not statics but clinical pharmacy, however, I am going to practice and research further in the discipline of evidence-based medicine. Thanks!

Tom

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Tom:
https://www.stata.com/bookstore/ offers an interesting and updated overwiev of the unbounded territory of statistics textbooks.

[Richard Williams]

I've always been fond of "A Gentle Introduction to Stata" (Acock) and "Statistics with Stata" (Hamilton). But there are now quite a few choices out there, some of which may be better suited for your field.

There is also a lot of freebie stuff online:

https://www.stata.com/links/resource...earning-stata/

[Tom Hsiung]

No. Not books for how to use Stata, but textbooks for statistics itself.

[Nick Cox]

Much depends on your mathematical preparation. Freedman, Pisani and Purves on statistics has many excellent features in explaining statistical ideas with minimal algebra. Conversely Rice's text on Mathematical Stafistics and Data Analysis does what its title implies but does not shrink from using the mathematics the students are assumed to recall. But I found it very accessible even though my formal mathematical education stopped at age 17.

[Marcos Almeida]

What works for me, instead of the ultimate book, is reading and rereading books. Sometimes, there is a treasure in a sole chapter here and there, for example. Unfortunately, life is too short to reread so many interesting books or excerpts. A pity.

That said, I have two suggestions, and they are related to biostatistics, because it is me favorite field: for those who want to dig deep on maths, Principles of Biostatistics (Marcello Pagano) is a nice try. For those still in fear of maths, albeit hungry for excellent stuff, I recommend Biostatistics Decoded, by A.Gouveia Oliveira.

[Richard Williams]

Personally, I find a lot of the Stata books don't just teach you how to use Stata, they help you to learn statistics by using Stata. I grasp statistics more easily when I can try estimating them myself.

[Marcos Almeida]

Fully agree with Richard. Applied statistics' books, sort of "problem based learning", are really an excellent strategy.