Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The study and use of statistics have come a long way since the advent of computers. Particularly, computers have reduced both the effort and the time involved in the statistical analysis of data. But this ease of use has been accompanied by some difficulties. As computers became more and more proficient at carrying out statistical operations of increasing complexity, the actual operations-and what they actually meant and did-became more and more distant from the user. It became possible to do a wide variety of statistical operations with a few lines or words of commands to the computer. But the average student, even the average serious user of statistics, found the increasingly complex operations increasingly difficult to access and understand"-- Provided by publisher.