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This book was developed from a set of lecture notes for a second-year course for statistics students. As a consequence, it is written to tell a story. There is an ordering of topics from data collection, through data storage and retrieval, to data processing. There is also a development from writing simple computer code with straightforward computer languages through to more complex tasks with more sophisticated languages. Furthermore, examples and case studies are carried over between different chapters in an attempt to illustrate how the different technologies need to be combined over the lifetime of a data set. In this way, the book is set up to be read in order from start to finish.
However, every effort has been made to ensure that individual chapters can be read on their own. Where necessary, figures are reproduced and descriptions are repeated so that it is not necessary to jump back and forth within the book in order to acquire a complete understanding of a particular section.
The addition of separate reference chapters is designed to allow the reader to quickly dip back into the book in order to refresh knowledge of a particular technology.
Paul Murrell
This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.