This book is divided into three basic parts. The first part includes the introductions and elementary descriptive statistics; I want the students to be knee-deep in data right out of the gate. The second part is the study of probability, which begins with the basics of sets and the equally likely model, journeys past discrete/continuous random variables, and continues through multivariate distributions. The chapter on sampling distributions paves the way to the third part, which is inferential statistics. This last part includes point and interval estimation, hypothesis testing, and introductions to selected topics in applied statistics. The vision for this document is a more or less self contained, essentially complete, and correct as an introductory textbook. There are a number of exercises for the student, with full solutions for some and no solutions for others, so that the instructor may assign them for grading. Sweave’s dynamic nature makes it possible to write randomly generated exercises, and I had planned to implement this idea already throughout the book.
