Book excerpt: Providing the reader with a user-friendly approach to this challenging field, this book covers the principles of design and analysis in chemical research and development. Organized in chapters dealing with major activities, this volume generates understanding through numerous examples and practical applications drawn from research and development chemistry. The authors concentrate on principles and interpretation rather than formal derivation and proof, and adopt the unifying theme that statistics and chemometrics are extensions of the logical processes used by chemists every day, which allows a greater understanding of problems more easily than intuitive methods.