After a gap of 10 years the third edition of this textbook for first year undergraduate biology students puts greater emphasis on planning and designing experiments, provides a more consistent framework for hypothesis testing and replaces exercises by worked examples. The book comes with a free trial edition of Minitab on disc.

With relatively few examples the authors try to instill an understanding of the why and how of statistical science. The style is persuasive rather than didactic but ‘you do need to read this book from start to finish, rather than dipping in for the bit you want’. There is a lot of reading, but I found the text generally very clear and easy to read. Part of the reason the authors have needed so many words, of course, is that they have not used any mathematics. Where necessary they have used mathematical notation but only after painstaking explanation.

The usual topics are covered: probability, distributions, estimation, confidence intervals, regression, analysis of variance, design of experiments, categorical data and non-parametric tests. While these are all covered at an introductory level an excellent chapter on ‘Managing Your Project’ would be equally valuable in a statistics guide for post-doctoral biology researchers.

Overall the authors balance well the need for an understanding of statistical ideas with the practical skills of using software to plot the data and implement the methodology.