David Coggon (2nd edition; pp 120; £14.95) 2002. BMJ Books. ISBN 0 7279 1609 2

• Coggon D
• Statistics in Clinical Practice

It is more difficult to write a good short book than a good long book! Textbooks of statistics tend to vary between easy introductions that never seem to tell you how to do the calculations and large ones that tell most of us too much. The desire, common among mathematicians, that we should understand the origins of all the methods, makes the bigger books hard going and, in practice, many research workers use computer software packages to do the analyses. How long …