Students genuinely learning from scratch must be assumed to have no knowledge of the subject at all, and lacking this knowledge, are ignorant of what it is they need to know. Would-be learners choosing a basic medical statistics book should therefore be very clear about why they want to learn statistics. Particularly, they must decide whether they are “doers” who are hands-on researchers (a minority) or “users” whose main need is to evaluate research done by others (the vast majority).

This book is aimed at a wide audience. However, it leans more strongly towards “doers” than “users.” For example, almost a third of …