THIS IS THE THIRD EDITION OF Statistics in the Pretty Darned Quick series. Despite the title, the authors, Geoffrey Norman and David Streiner are Canadians with appropriate backgrounds to produce an understandable text in Statistics for health professionals. Norman is a professor of clinical epidemiology and Streiner a professor of psychiatry. I suspect the easy style of the book is a serious attempt to tailor information to the reader. This is not an introductory book. The pitch, however, is such that those with some post-graduate biostatistics will be able to dissolve that greyness that persists after you have passed the stats exam and then want to use some stats later in practice. Be aware that this is a biostatistics book and is only very light on research design.
The book is divided into sensible parts moving from the nature of variables onto parametric, then non-para metric and the dreaded multivariate analyses. I have found this allows either building on fundamentals towards concepts or spot referencing. Biostatistics are always more understandable when related back to a real situation. Naturally, by real I mean a clinical situation, which is style used by Norman and Streiner. With the addition of the CRAP detectors (convoluted reasoning or anti-intellectual pomposity), the authors provide tools to highlight misuse or misinterpretation of statistical tests making the book good value as a reference for critical appraisal of research. It may even have you reading Results and Methodology sections of papers to look for CRAP.
PDQ Statistics is distributed by Elsevier Science (www.harcourt.com.au) in Australia and New Zealand and should come with a CD-ROM of the text enclosed.