Understanding statistical concepts using S-plus

This supplementary text is aimed at students in introductory and intermediate statistics courses. Its structure follows the layout of many common statistics textbooks, and every chapter opens with a list of learning objectives and closes with a summary.

The emphasis is on building conceptual understanding of basic statistics. Chapter exercises run on S-PLUS simulation programs, so students can work through problems without having to write code themselves. Each chapter explains how its programs operate and what their output means. The book also traces how probability shaped the statistical procedures used in the behavioral sciences, and it outlines the origins of several common statistics.

S-PLUS is presented as an advanced statistical package with a large library of functions that can be used to write customized routines. It can also build dialog and object windows of the kind found in Windows applications, and it includes pull-down menus for analyzing data. A ZIP file of the programs is available for download. These scripts work only in S-PLUS 6.2, because later versions use different programming syntax.