biostatistics books

	Biostatistics: A Foundation for Analysis in the Health Sciences (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics)
	By: Wayne W. Daniel ISBN: 0471456543 Publisher: Wiley Release Date: 25 November, 2004 Bioscience book rank: 227804	This book is extreamly helpful for academic research. It can be somewhat more technical than most people would need. <br /> Daniel obviously knows his statistics; but, I wouldnt think that is too helpful for individuals reading or studying from his textbook. <br />The reasons are numerous, and all these reasons would reduce anyone's chances of solely using this book, or even using it at all. <br />The textbook is well organized, however Daniel's writing often is pedantic, repetitive (not in the helpful way) and ambiguous at best. <br />The examples and solutions occassionaly have serious errors in them which affect the overall outcome of the test (A second consideration is that the book is in it's 8th edition!!! therefore such errors are unacceptable for a person such as myself). <br />An example can be found on page 239 (example 7.3.2). The pooled variance, as calculated by Daniel is approximately off by 100 simply because he didnt give attention to dividing the numerator with the proper pooled D.F of the samples. The chapter ironically was on hypothesis tests, something extremely important to any line of empirically oriented statistics. <br /> <br />In Chapter 8; which is probably the most important chapter in Bistatistics (ANOVAs) he does not mention the relationship between MSW and sample SD. Also, his usage of Summation in formulas often are unnecessarily overcomplicated. Such is not even seen in professional journals. <br /> <br />I did like this textbook regardless of its many shortcomings, its not because I liked the author's style of writing. Its more or less the fact that my lecturer (I assume) used this book heavily in his lectures and so I used it as a supplementary text. <br /> <br />I would suggest, Chap T. Le's Introductory Biostatistics. However he goes too much into nonparametric methods and proportions and doesnt cocentration (to the degree I wanted) on continous data. <br /> <br />More robust and probably cost effect books are :Introductory Statistics for the Life Sciences by Samuels. But the Best book I have ever seen on the subject is "Introductory Biostatistics for the health sciences" By Chernick and Friis. The book is well priced and no portion of this book, I have seen as being useless. I'm taking my first biostatistics class in medical school, but the text I am using in class (Rosner) has lost me. I subsequently borrowed Daniel's book from the library (only because it has 7th editions), and I am glad that I picked it! Daniel is a good writer. The book is well organized and laid out. Important concepts are emphased and explained with minimum mathematics involved. The well thought out examples are worth working through as well for clarification of the applications of important concepts. However, as a beginner in statistics, I was lost in the midst of mathematics on certain concepts (given that I have a relatively strong mathematics background) without really understanding the meaning of some very basic terms, like percentile, confidence intervals. <br /> <br />What I do is to read another reference book that explains the very basic concepts in plain English first before reading this text. I am currently using Munro's Statistical Methods for Health Care Research. While both of them cover the same set of concepts, Daniel gives me the mathematical and more advanced explainations compare to Munro.
	Regression Methods in Biostatistics: Linear, Logistic, Survival, and Repeated Measures Models (Statistics for Biology and Health)
	By: Eric Vittinghoff, David V. Glidden, Stephen C. Shiboski, Charles E. McCulloch ISBN: 0387202757 Publisher: Springer Release Date: 08 June, 2007 Bioscience book rank: 217198	The authors say that they created this book to fit with a course they taught at UC San Francisco to medical students. The book is very sophisticated and a great reference source for practicing biostatisticians in industry or research. It surprises me a little that they find it effective for there non-technical audience. Although the topics are technical and many are advanced they do cover it in a conceptual way without heavy mathematics but still requiring some statistics classes as prerequisite. <br /> <br />Regression does not cover all the techniques of biostatistics but as the authors point out the four topics in the subtitle are among the most important. I know this from my many years of experience as a bisostatistician in the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. They use many good practical examples useing many of the common variables studies in many clinical trials where physical exams are given to record blood pressure and other vital signs and chemistry labs are done to determine cholesterol levels and other things that can be factors in various diseases. Also glucose levels are very important to monitor for diabetes trials. <br /> <br />In addition to the standard topics general estimating equations and generalized linear models are covered and where appropriate bootstrap confidence intervals. There is even a chapter on complex surveys a topic important when quality of life is an endpoint and survey instruments are used to measure it. <br /> <br />In the survival analysis chapter the Kaplan-Meier curves, log rank tests and Cox proportional hazards models are covered as expected but the authors go further to include extensions of the Cox model when the proportional hazards assumption fails. My only disappointment is that there is no coverage of actuarial life tables. At the medical device companies that I worked for it was common to get interval data on events rather than continuous data and then the Cutler-Ederer life table method is the analog for interval data to the Kaplan-Meier estimator for continuous data. <br /> <br />The book covers many topics but is concise as the authors claim. The authors provide a lot of examples that they work out using the statistical package Stata. The authors claim that Stata is the package of choice for biostatistics. This may be the case in academic settings but is certainly not the case in the pharmaceutical industry where SAS is used almost exclusively. I think that it would have been better to show how to write the computer code for solving these problems both in SAS and Stata. To the authors credit Stat is a very good package for their purpose and they do at times mention SAS and SPSS which are the other two major statistical packages used in industry. <br /> <br />All in all this is a very good book that is worth its list price. I will use it as a reference. it also contains a very nice bibliography of 9 pages. This book covers a wide range of topics in Biostatistics, in a comprehensive, but not overwhelming way. In my opinion this book has the potential of being useful to a broad audience, from Statisticians to other professionals who do health related research. A very specific book, with a lot of details for a statistitian
	Basic & Clinical Biostatistics (LANGE Basic Science)
	By: Beth Dawson, Robert G. Trapp, Robert Trapp ISBN: 0071410171 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Medical Release Date: 02 April, 2004 Bioscience book rank: 130584	I had to purchase this book for a class I am taking. This is a fourth edition book and I have to correct errors before reading each chapter. I give publishers some leeway on a first edition, but by the fourth the kinks should be worked out. Also, there is some crucial information missing when making the calculations and sometimes it does not give enough detail on how to work through the problems. The book is very detailed and an excellent read and resource for anyone who is in the field of science and someone who reads scientific peer-reviewed journal articles. Though there were some errors in some calculations in the book, overall, it is very helpful and a great way to learn biostatistics and applications in the clinical setting and research settings. I have very little background in biostats, and need to learn it for medical research and research design. <br /> <br />This book is difficult to read, has far too much emphasis on mathematics and far too little empahisis on concept. After a whole quarter in Biostats using this book, I can tell you very little about how and when to employ certain basis statistics tests or interpret them with confidence. The answers in the back are ofter erroneous, as is some of the text (according to my professor). <br /> <br />The only thing I can seay that is good about this test is that the NCSS software that comes with it I think may be helpful at some point. <br /> <br />I am back in the market for a better book!
	Principles of Biostatistics (with CD-ROM)
	By: Marcello Pagano, Kimberlee Gauvreau ISBN: 0534229026 Publisher: Duxbury Press Release Date: 09 March, 2000 Bioscience book rank: 225182	Like Rosner's book by the same publisher, this text is an introductory text by Harvard professors who teach medical students. It seems to be in competition with Rosner's book which makes me wonder why the same publisher is publishing them both. The style is different but the market and level of the two books seem to be the same. Both texts include diskettes with data for PCs. Both books are well written and cover mostly the same topics. The Pagano text seems to go into a little more detail on contingency tables and survival analysis. Both contain lists of valuable references. <br /> It is written for students who dont have a good mathematical background..Therefore it is too wordy for an engineer , physics or math student..as a student with such background, I founded many long explanations redundant as they could be said in 2 lines.. <br /> The language in this book is very hard to understand. I took statistics when I was an undergrad and but this book is so hard to understand. The authors tried to show more steps in the math examples maybe try to make it easier for the reader but it just make it MUCH more complicated to follow. Sometimes I have to read my undergrad statistics book in order for me to understand the same thing it says in this book.
	Basic Biostatistics: Statistics for Public Health Practice
	By: B. Burt Gerstman ISBN: 0763735809 Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Publishers Release Date: 26 July, 2007 Bioscience book rank: 147261
	High-Yield™ Biostatistics (High-Yield™ Series)
	By: Anthony N Glaser ISBN: 078179644X Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Release Date: 01 December, 2004 Bioscience book rank: 75234	I first encountered this book when it was called "Biostatistics for the Boards" when I took the course from Dr. Glaser when he was teaching at the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine in 1990. Dr. Glaser was an exceptionally good and popular teacher and the book reflects his "no-nonsense" style. At first I thought it was a "dumbed down" statistics book as I had taken a full year of stats in college and my previous books had been huge and heavy textbooks. However, I soon found that the reason Dr. Glaser's book was so brief was that he concentrates only on the type of concepts and questions you will find on the USMLE step 1. The chapters are short and it is easy to review each one many times to firmly plant the info into long term memory. I had no problems at all with the stats on the USMLE. This book presents exactly what you need to answer all the questions on the USMLE without having you waste a lot of time studying things you will never use. Are you one of those people that are scared of Biostatistics? Fear no more!! This book is for you. It explains everything in a very smart and simple way. Plenty of examples and tests help you to master the subject. If you study this book well, you will "understand" biostatistics and you don't have to memorize nonsense informations. two thumbs up! ACTUALLY GIVES A HIGHER YIELD IN MARKS-AMUST HAVE
	Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Preventive Medicine: With STUDENT CONSULT Online Access
	By: James F. Jekel, David L. Katz, Joann G. Elmore, Dorothea Wild ISBN: 141603496X Publisher: Saunders Release Date: 07 May, 2007 Bioscience book rank: 477848
	Biostatistics: The Bare Essentials 3/E (Biostatistics: The Bare Essentials Biostatistics: The Bare E)
	By: Geoffrey R. Norman, David L. Streiner ISBN: 1550093479 Publisher: BC Decker Inc. Release Date: 30 September, 2007 Bioscience book rank: 200615
	Fundamentals of Biostatistics (with CD-ROM)
	By: Bernard Rosner ISBN: 0534418201 Publisher: Duxbury Press Release Date: 24 February, 2005 Bioscience book rank: 207314	Bernard Rosner is a Harvard Professor of Biostatistics. He has written an introductory text for undergraduate and graduate medical school students. It covers the basics of probability and inference including categorical data. Other topics include regression, correlation and survival analysis. It is written for students with no math beyond high school algebra but common mathematical notation is freely used. It includes a diskette with data for examples. Many examples are given to illustrate the concepts and SAS ouput is used to illustrate the results and familiarize the students so that they can interpret statistical output. Many exercises are given at the end of each chapter. Several require use of the data sets on the diskette. I think the author has been careful to try to make the subject understandable to medical students. He also has used the lectures notes that were the basis of the text in courses he taught in the Harvard Medical School. So he knows his audience. A unique feature is the catergorizing of exercises by medical specialty. <br /> <br />Rosner tries to fill an important need and does a good job. He avoids heavy mathematics without turning the text into a cookbook. This is now the fourth edition. So many improvements have been made. I gave it 4 stars. It probably deserves 4 and 1/2 stars. <br /> <br /> I was in a sense forced to purchase this text as it was the official text for my class. Unfortunately, if you are a researcher just trying to obtain a basic understanding of the field of statistics, this is not the book for you. There is very little that is understandable to a beginner or even to someone with some basic knowledge in the field. This book is purely meant for the statistican. Norman and Streiner's text on biostatistics and Andy Field's text on Statistics and SPSS are written in plain language. They are easy to understand and get the concepts across with only the bare minimum of formulas thrown around. This book's primary usefulness is its comprehensiveness, but that only goes so far when the text is just unintelligible to most of us mere mortals. This book is a necesary complement for epidemiology, and basic investigatigation. The chapter's organization is very adecuate for novice and experienced. Every chapter has an easy form to learn the content. The exercises are very congruent with the objetive of evry theme.
	Primer of Biostatistics (Primer of Biostatistics (Glantz)(Paperback))
	By: Stanton A. Glantz ISBN: 0071435093 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Medical Release Date: 15 April, 2005 Bioscience book rank: 404642	Unfortunately, this book is filled with typos and mathematical errors, including the solutions section. A maths book clearly fails by letting its readers down and wasting their time when errors exist in the solutions section. Some are even as basic as addition and subtraction errors in formulating solutions tables. How can you trust this as a mathematical guide when clearly the author has failed at simple calculations? The errors are otherwise just about acceptable in the standard text. <br /> <br />Whilst it reads well in parts, its strengths come from the examples provided, which relate to real life clinical trials and data. However, despite my relatively decent mathematical background, derivations sometimes suddenly lead to a formula or solution out of the blue. The text unfortunately does so in parts too leaving out the systematic approach to the explanation. <br /> <br />I guess you can't have both a true mathematical guide with such clinical emphasis, but for me, the typos just destroy it. If you seriously haven't been affected by the typos, especially the ones in the solutions, then you're clearly not reading carefully enough. The waste of time to get to the wrong solution when you probably had the right one at hand hours before is deeply annoying. <br /> <br />Overall, this book reflects quite poorly on Glantz who in my opinion, is morally and ethically bound to passing on accurate knowledge when he takes on a challenge as difficult as producing a statistical guide. Addendums, erratas or even a statement acknowledging this would have sufficed for now. Without these irritating errors, the strengths of the book really would have been something to rate this book highly for. <br /> <br />Seriously beware. Needs to be pulled of bookshelves in this state. The quickest, most accurate stats book out there. Warning: you must read it carefully, you can't really skim. That said, if you do read it carefully, even just the first few chapters, you will truly understand basic stats. Before reading this I didn't get significance or what a t-test really meant. Now I can speak the lingo and critically assess other authors work. Just a great book if you give it a few hours to sink in. <br />Get the 5th edition, not the 6th, for some reason the 6th is full of typos and errors in the examples. If you can not explaine it in plane english you probably don't undestand it yourself. In this book the author present a clear explanation of this technical field in plane english.