Book excerpt: This book is intended to help analytical chemists feel comfortable with more commonly used statistical operations and help them make effective use of the results. Emphasis is put upon computer-based methods that are applied in relation to measurement and the quality of the resulting data. The book is intended for analytical chemists working in industry but is also appropriate for students taking first degrees or an MSc in analytical chemistry.The authors have divided this book into quite short sections, each dealing with a single topic. The sections are as far as possible selfcontained, but are extensively cross-referenced. The book can therefore be used either systematically by reading the sections sequentially, or as a quick reference by going directly to the topic of interest. Every statistical method and application covered has at least one example where the results are analysed in detail. This enables readers to emulate this analysis on their own examples. All of the datasets used in examples are available for download, so that readers can compare their own output with that of the book and thus verify that they are entering data correctly into the statistical package that they happen to use./a