Commonly there is no natural place in a traditional curriculum for mathematics or statistics, where a bridge between theory and practice fits into. On the other hand, the demand for an education designed to supplement theoretical training by practial experience has been rapidly increasing.

There exists, consequently, a bit of a dichotomy between theoretical and applied statistics, and this book tries to straddle that gap. It links up the theory of a selection of statistical procedures used in general practice with their application to real world data sets using the statistical software package SAS (Statistical Analysis System). These applications are intended to illustrate the theory and to provide, simultaneously, the ability to use the knowledge effectively and readily in execution.