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Comment by yankoff | Hacker News Reader

While you guys are here, can you recommend a good intro book for statistics?

Yankoff, you might want to be more specific. Intro statistics in general, or for computer scientists, or scientists, or looking to learn R at the same time? I liked Freedman, Pisani, and Purves [1], and have TA'ed using McClave, Sincich, and Mendenhall [2]. You may want something a little more advanced than these, but they are pretty good for intro level.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-4th-David-Freedman/dp/03939... [2]: http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-11th-Edition-Book-CD/dp/013... [3]: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/421/what-book-would...

Yeah, I meant something for computer scientists. I'm going over coursera ML course currently and wanted to learn at least basics of statistics in parallel.

Thanks, I'll check out your links.

Btw, what do you think of OpenIntro statistics?http://www.openintro.org/stat/down/OpenIntroStatSecond.pdf

You will find the intro books don't talk much about parallel computing. Most of the general data sets in intro books will be no more than 30 observations. They are trying to teach classical methods moreso than useful computational techniques. As for parallel statistics, I don't have a good book recommendation. Most of my knowledge on the topic comes from papers and vignettes from the R community and not books. Maybe check out one of those O'Reilly books about big data techniques?

I haven't seen this OpenIntro statistics before. I'll check it out!

That OpenIntro pdf looks great! Thanks for the link.

You may like Wasserman's All of Statistics:

http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~larry/all-of-statistics/

It was written as an introduction to statistics for people in CS and related fields.

Very intro (like, Stats 101 intro): Purves, Pisani, and Freedman's is the best book I've seen. I'd combine that with something like Tufte's or Wainer's statistical graphics books to try to get some sophistication (for lack of a better word).

I like the NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods (http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/).

The e-Handbook won't make you an expert statistician, but as an engineer needing to understand and apply statistical methods, I've found it to be a good starting point.

Check out the Intro to Stats course on Udacity:

https://www.udacity.com/course/st101

Just took it earlier this year. It was informative and I enjoyed the class.

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