A course in introductory biostatistics is often required for professional students
in public health, dentistry, nursing, and medicine, and for graduate students in
nursing and other biomedical sciences, a requirement that is often considered a
roadblock, causing anxiety in many quarters. These feelings are expressed in many
ways and in many di¤erent settings, but all lead to the same conclusion: that students
need help, in the form of a user-friendly and real data-based text, in order to
provide enough motivation to learn a subject that is perceived to be discult and
dry. This introductory text is written for professionals and beginning graduate
students in human health disciplines who need help to pass and benefit from the
basic biostatistics requirement of a one-term course or a fullyear sequence of two
courses. Our main objective is to avoid the perception that statistics is just a
series of formulas that students need to ‘‘get over with, but to present it as a
way of thinking—thinking about ways to gather and analyze data so as to benefit
from taking the required course. There is no better way to do that than to base
a book on real data, so many real data sets in various fields are provided in the
form of examples and exercises as aids to learning how to use statistical procedures,
still the nuts and bolts of elementary applied statistics.