Essentials of Biostatistics in Public Health, Fourth Edition provides a fundamental and engaging background for students learning to apply and appropriately interpret biostatistics applications in the field of public health. Many examples are drawn directly from the author's remarkable clinical experiences with the renowned Framingham Heart Study, making this text practical, interesting, and accessible for those with little mathematical background. The examples are real, relevant, and manageable in size so that students can easily focus on applications rather than become overwhelmed by computations. The Fourth Edition has been thoroughly updated, and now offers a new chapter on career opportunities in biostatistics and new case studies focused on COVID-19 within each chapter. This edition also includes free access to JMP® Student Subscription (a $29.95 value). New cases based on COVID-19 highlight the importance and practical applications of biostatistics for addressing the pandemic.
It's written with the assumption that the reader has some amount of statistics knowledge, and expands on that knowledge with a focus on, as you might guess, public health and epidemiology. Even though my last previous statistics course was sometime in the first Clinton administration, I found this book's lessons and instructions easy to follow and very helpful in the classroom.
There is an online supplement to the book, but as far as I could find out, it's only accessible if you purchase the physical book. I bought a Kindle version and was unable to use the online component.
If this book had an answer key then I’d give it 4 stars. I liked the clear layout, easy to follow examples and practice problems were good until they were because I had no means of knowing if I got the answer right. Still did them because the practice was helpful but frustrating as heck!
This textbook is one of the few math related books that I actually read through the whole semester and didn't dread the weekly readings. The formulas were explained and built on in ways I felt comfortable with and could follow. I also found the sample problems worked out in the textbook to be understandable in one read through (a phenomenon I don't usually experience with quantitative textbook examples) without having the process explained by someone else first.