I hope this question is sufficiently different from the other requests for book recommendations that it's not repetitious. If not, I apologize in advance.
I'm curious what standard reference books working statisticians, or biostatisticians, have within easy reach of their desk. I'm a computer systems administrator, and have a two-foot bookshelf directory under my monitor that contains 13 paperback manuals that I refer to frequently, some once or twice a day. Are there standard reference works for statisticians that are used the same way? From reading this list, I'm guessing that one might be W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley (2002), "Modern Applied Statistics with S. Fourth Edition", Springer, ISBN 0-387-95457-0. However, I'm not limiting this to books pertaining to R. On the other hand, maybe Google and other on-line sources, as well as interactive programs like R that can spit out numbers previously looked up in tables, have completely replaced the need for reference books. Is this the case today? I'm particularly interested in reference books that may be helpful in my organization's work. We typically deal with datasets from international Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) similar to those available at http://www.measuredhs.com/aboutsurveys/search/search_survey_main.cfm?Srv yTp=type&listtypes=1. These typically contain 10,000+ respondents and can have up to 800 fields. We currently analyze these datasets using Stata. Thanks for taking the time to think about and respond to this question. I'll summarize the answers in a later post for the archive. -Kevin Kevin Zembower Internet Services Group manager Center for Communication Programs Bloomberg School of Public Health Johns Hopkins University 111 Market Place, Suite 310 Baltimore, Maryland 21202 410-659-6139 ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.