Introductory Statistics with R

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Ask HN: Statistics for Programmers I'm trying to learn elementary statistics, but I cannot find a good book (or website) to start with. I tried 'Introductory Statistics with R' but it assumes you already understand basic statistics. Everything that I lookup on Amazon is a textbook and cost an arm and a leg, and I'd rather not shell out for something that I'm not sure about. So tell me, how did you learn statistics and what would you suggest to someone whose been programming for 10+ years but doesn't know what to do with a standard deviation.

Zed actually recommends quite a few books in his post: * Statistics; by Freedman, Pisani, Purves, and Adhikari. Norton publishers. * Introductory Statistics with R; by Dalgaard. Springer publishers. * Statistical Computing: An Introduction to Data Analysis using S-Plus; by Crawley. Wiley publishers. * Statistical Process Control; by Grant, Leavenworth. McGraw-Hill publishers. * Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences; by Agresti, Finlay. Prentice-Hall publishers. * Methods of Social Research; by Baily. Free Press publishers. * Modern Applied Statistics with S-PLUS; by Venables, Ripley. Springer publishers.

…tatisticians have any idea what they are doing. That said, here's what has sort of worked for me: - Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick - Fundamentals of Applied Probability Theory by Al Drake: out of print, and mostly about probability. However, the stats intro at the end is the clearest one I've ever read. Originally recommended to me by Philip Greenspun. - Introductory Statistics with R by Peter Dalgaard. I'm assuming if you are posting to Hacker News you probably are coming from a programming background. This book does exactly what the title says, shows you how to apply introductory statistics by programming. It's heavier on R than stats.