It looks like he publishes one every seven years ("The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" in 1983, "Envisioning Information" in 1990) so I think I'm going to budget $0.02 per day and get them all.

Perhaps the most significant chapter is his analysis of how bad graphic presentation contributed to the loss of the space shuttle "Challenger." Basically, he believes that data were available which could and should have led to a decision to cancel the launch, but that the engineers failed to communicate it to the decision-makers. And he shows exactly how and why they failed.

Left brain? right brain? Tufte shows us visual elegance in the service of quantitative thinking.

This third book in the triology on "information presentation" is as splendid as the previous two books. In this volume the emphasis is, as the title suggests, on methods for creating powerful illustrations and graphics that could help you present your knowledge in a non-disputable way.

The most intriguing section in this book without doubt the chapter on the Challenger disaster in 1986. The rocket engineers back then had worries about the launch on Jan 28. However they were not at all able to communicate their worries to NASA and so it ended... In a worrying few number of pages, Mr. Tufte, dissects the data presented to NASA by the engineers and creates a information redesign which makes it clear to anyone that the launch should have been postponed.

I still belive that book 2, "Envisioning Information" is the most required. Buy that book and if you love is (as I do), then buy the other two books as well.

The layout of this book is fully in thread with the others in the series. Beautiful, engaging, ingenious, etc. The print quality is second to none - you really have a feeling that the crew behind these books have been nursing their babies.

So Mr. Tufte - where is number four in the series?

Statistics is a kind of data-compression - you start off with with a bag of data and you extract certain "features" such as averages, standard deviations etc... ...this allows you to say general things about the entire dataset (avg/SD, etc.) or claim associations between multiple datasets with varying degrees of confidence (correlations) or even predict the value of one variable if you know the other (regressions).

The dangerous thing is, if you are not careful about how you "compress" this data or about what you do or don't do with the dataset (like dealing with outliers), your conclusions may be ENTIRELY INVALID! By using specific examples, this book teaches you to look at what are you doing before you do the analysis and then how to look at your results after you do your compression (running statistical studies).

I was reluctant to buy this book at the bookstore at first, but after having read the entire text, I believe this investment was money well spent. If you don't believe me, check it out in a bookstore before you buy the book.

Good luck!

Discussion of the data snooping issue is important, particularly as we move into an age where data mining is now feasible with current computing power.

The book was originally published in 1954. The many copious examples were current at the time of writing, but are extremely dated now. Depending on the readers attitude this may be distracting, or faintly amusing. The advanced age of the examples does not make the text any harder to understand.

While the examples are dated, the concepts appear to be timeless. The same statistical manipulations still seem to be going on nearly fifty years later. The Author covers a wide range of statistical errors, or abuse. All of the types of errors will be familiar to anyone who pays attention to the news, or has seen an advertisement that uses numbers.

How to Lie with Statistics gives the reader the knowledge to detect common statistical skulduggery. If this knowledge were more widely spread, perhaps advertisers, political spinmiesters and sloppy journalists would not be able to get away with that sort of abuse.

For an excellent short introduction to the problems of polling, as well as other statistical nightmares, check out "How to Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff. This little book, which you can read in an afternoon, was written in the 50's and is *still* the definitive bible on how statistics can be misused.

It's fun to read, too, and I laughed out loud a number of times while reading it. A more accurate (but less catchy) title for the book would be "how other people lie with statistics, and how you can recognize it when they try to snow you." Each section describes a way that statistics or graphs are misused, and then gives real-life examples from advertisements or newspaper articles or political speeches of the author's day which illustrate the misuse in action. Sad to say, Huff's examples from the 50's look just like the crap we get shoved at us today. Some things never change.

The book only costs about $5, and from it you'll learn as much as an entire college course. Get a copy, read it, and lend it to friends. If I had to throw away all my books and could only keep a dozen, this would be one of the keepers.

No, statisticians and mathematicians probably wouldn't learn much. I'm a scientist with a Ph.D. though, and keep a copy in my office because I work in a business world where too many PowerPoints make use of exactly the kind of misleading presentation techniques described in the title of this book.

I recommend BUSINESS STATISTICS (By Ken Black). He explains the concepts quite extensively. This book coupled with the humor of the Cartoon Guide will make Statistics a little but more bearable (especially for non-math majors like me:)

This book won't help you much in the practical application of statistics (for that you need problem sets), but will certainly aid in understanding the general ideas behind the math.

If you're a sales person, it should be a handbook. If you are not, it could change the way you communicate with the people close to you.

Selling is an art of communication. The science of selling, dressed up as an obvious and simple protocol in this book, can elevate selling to a high art of precision and expediency.

When I read "High Probability Selling", I wanted to start a sales career right away. I LOVED IT!

I strongly recommend this book and sales stystem to any person who values their own integrity; sanity and self-respect.

The authors also have the annoying habit of refering to the results of previous problems/excercises. Therefore, in order to do some exercises/examples, you must go back and work one or two of the exercises from one of the previous chapters. The book would have been a lot more helpful if the author would provide the solutions for exercises that he intends to build upon.

Quibbles apart, Casella & Berger is a demanding but most rewarding and stimulating introduction to (so-called) mathematical statistics, and in particular it is exceptionally dependable and witty. Beginning students may require some complementary material in the form of standard exercises and worked-out examples.

Here's the textbooks chapter titles: 1) Partial Differentiation, 2) Vectors, 3) Differential Geometry', 4) Applications of Partial Differentation, 5) Stieltjes Integral, 6) Multiple Integrals, 7) Line and Surface Integrals, 8) Limits and Indeterminate Forms, 9) Infinite Series, 10) Convergence of Improper Integrals, 11) The Gamma Function. Evaluation of Definite Integrals, 12) Fourier Series, 13) The Laplace Transform, 14) Applications of the Laplace Transform.

The book may be considered as being written in the ole' school style. It was written by a former Professor of Mathematics at Harvard and was first printed in 1947. The relatively low cost of the textbook may be attributed to it not having been 'updated' for a while, being devoid of any color, and being softbound. It has some worked out examples but focuses more on established theorems and lemmas to solve problems. The book is fairly well organized and is overall a good reference book.

In fact this is not an advanced book. But being advanced or not does depend on who is located in front of the book. It is, but rather, a continuation of the classic Calculus texts like Thomas, Leithold, Taylor, etc. This as for the content, that includes topics like Stieltjes Integral, line and surface Integrals, Fourier Series and Laplace Transformed (Stieltjes Integral can be included in the non advanced Calculus courses after treating the parametric equations in a Calculus course that is not considered advanced). What makes special this book it is the easiness with which the author introduces the topics, without necessity of entering in rodeos. He goes once and for all to the grain and it presents the whole content without creating doubts in the reader. It selects their exercises very well, leaving very undoubtedly that any student that has read each section of the book carefully, they can carry out them. The answers are at the end of the book. It presents the theorems with a nomenclature without complications, facilitating the reader's understanding. This book deserves to be in our shelves for future references, and anyone can have it without fear to lose its money, since it is very cheap....