I was in a sense forced to purchase this text as it was the official text for my class. Unfortunately, if you are a researcher just trying to obtain a basic understanding of the field of statistics, this is not the book for you. There is very little that is understandable to a beginner or even to someone with some basic knowledge in the field. This book is purely meant for the statistican. Norman and Streiner's text on biostatistics and Andy Field's text on Statistics and SPSS are written in plain language. They are easy to understand and get the concepts across with only the bare minimum of formulas thrown around. This book's primary usefulness is its comprehensiveness, but that only goes so far when the text is just unintelligible to most of us mere mortals.