Last week, I finished plowing through Allen Downey's Think Stats. It took me about 5 days to work through it cover-to-cover. This book is great for those who need a crash course in using Python to do statistics. The conceit of the book is that it's a stats book for programmers. Hence, the statistics in it aren't past an upper-lever undergraduate level in difficulty. However, the programming required to work through the problems is at a higher level than I have seen in any other introductory stats book. I found it to be a great way to improve my Python programming. I worked through about 80% of the examples, skipping only those that were either trivial or did not seem relevant to my learning goals. For many of the examples, Downey provides .py files you can download from the book's website. I found that I usually took a different approach to solving problems than he did, but we most often agreed on the solutions.
Anyway, the book is available as a free download and worth the time.
Anyway, the book is available as a free download and worth the time.
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