Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

Wheelan explains the statistical ideas that turn up in ordinary working life without asking the reader to do much of the maths. Chapters cover descriptive statistics and what an average conceals, correlation, basic probability, the central limit theorem, inference, polling, and regression analysis with a clear warning about how it gets abused. The examples come from sport, medicine, education policy and business rather than from textbooks, and the tone sits closer to popular science than to a course. There is a useful chapter on how data gets collected badly and why that matters more than the analysis that follows. A reasonable first statistics book for anyone who reads dashboards for a living.