Stats With Cats is a great companion to any introductory textbook in statistics. You won’t find a lot of equations or descriptions of the central limit theorem, probability, and hypothesis testing. You can find that information in traditional statistical texts. What you will find are topics like data scrubbing, minimizing variance, model building, and critiquing statistical reports. You’ll need these skills to complete your own statistical analyses. Think of Stats with Cats as a textbook for Statistics 101.5.

Following the words of Samuel Johnson, Stats With Cats tries “to make new things familiar and familiar things new” by using graphics, examples, stories, quotes, songs, obscure cultural references, way too many analogies, and a little bit of humor. Hopefully, you’ll recognize which is which.

Stats With Cats will be available mid-January, 2011. Here are some of the other things you’ll find inside.

PART I. The Lost Treasures of Statistics 101
Chapter 1. Reality Statistics
Chapter 2. Data Speak
Chapter 3. Designer Datasets
Chapter 4. Hellbent on Measurement
Chapter 5. Catch an Error by the Tail
Chapter 6. The Zen of Modeling
Chapter 7. Assuming the Worst
Chapter 8. Perspectives on Objectives

PART II. Frisky Business
Chapter 9. The Statistical Do-It-Yourselfer
Chapter 10. Manage to Get It Right
Chapter 11. Weapons of Math Production
Chapter 12. Tales of the Unprojected

PART III. Is that a Dataset in your Pocket?
Chapter 13. In Search of … Variables
Chapter 14. Not-So-Simple Samples
Chapter 15. The Heart and Soul of Variance Control
Chapter 16. Functional File Formats

PART IV. Statistical Foreplay
Chapter 17. Getting the Numbers Right
Chapter 18. Getting the Right Numbers
Chapter 19. Kicking the Data Tires
Chapter 20. Teaching Old Data New Tricks

PART V. A Model for Modeling
Chapter 21. Modelus Operandi
Chapter 22. The Land Beyond Statistics 101
Chapter 23. Models and Sausages

PART VI. Saving the World One Analysis at a Time
Chapter 24. Grasping at Flaws
Chapter 25. The TerraByte Zone

Read more about using statistics at the Stats with Cats blog. Join other fans at the Stats with Cats Facebook group and the Stats with Cats Facebook page. Order Stats with Cats: The Domesticated Guide to Statistics, Models, Graphs, and Other Breeds of Data Analysis at Wheatmark, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, or other online booksellers.