DATA VISUALISATION Template for producing a diagram of a bacterial genome with the location of SNPs or other mutations, using DataGraph.
INTRODUCTORY BOOKS THAT I LIKE
Modern Statistics for The Life Sciences, by Alan Grafen & Rosie Hails. This book is a great introduction to ANOVA/regression-type stats, with a very useful focus on test assumptions and how to check them, and common pitfalls. The examples use Minitab, but the focus is very much on what tests to with data and how to think about this, rather than teaching the reader to use a specific software package.
Introductory Statistics with R, by Peter Dalgaard. This is a relatively short and well-indexed book that is easy to use as a quick reference. It's designed to help you implement statistical tests you already know and understand in R, i.e. it's geared towards to learning R code, not to learning the statistical tests themselves.
The MEI A-level statistics textbooks are very well written and clearly explain the key concepts using examples where appropriate.
ONLINE STATISTICS RESOURCES
The following list of web resources will be regularly updated. Most of the links are aimed at undergraduate life sciences students, though there are some more advanced statistics resources as well. My top recommendation for stats Q&A is the stats stack exchange site CrossValidated.
Online courses
HarvardX biomedical data science open online training. An integrated course that starts with the basics of populations, samples and hypothesis tests, then moves on to multivariate analyses and working with genomic data. Includes written material, videos and code.
Why P-values are Evil from Bob O'Hara's blog (originally published on on Nature Network)
Cohen, J (1990). Things I have learned (so far) American Psychologist 45(12), 1304–1312. This is a wonderful article about doing and using statistics which should be read by everyone. Full text is available here.
The PENIS of Statistics: a lecture by Andy Field on the key concepts of parameters, estimation, null hypothesis significance testing, intervals and standard error. (On YouTube).
Interactive web tools for visualising fundamental concepts
Java applets from Introduction to the Practice of Statistics by Moore & McCabe. This is an absolutely wonderful interactive guide to statistical thinking, hypothesis tests and ANOVA. Start here!
Seeing Theory. Uses web applets to visualise how probability, sampling and statistical inference work.
Unit of Analysis Issues in Laboratory-Based Research. This article deals with repeated measures in experiments. It covers the single-summary (take mean of repeats) and nested ANOVA / random effects approaches used by Grafen & Hails in their 'sheep' data example - but it goes into more detail and comes with the relevant R code.
Tests and critical value tables
GraphPad QuickCalcs T-test, sign test, Fisher's exact test, ChiSq, CIs and lots more.
Daniel Soper's Statistics Calculators A pretty comprehensive list of calculators for critical values, confidence intervals, effect sizes, regression, power and much more.
Free Statistical Software - a list of freeware for Mac, Windows and Unix. Inlcudes general stats packages and also some programmes specifically designed for analysing animal populations.
Generalized Linear Models chapter from JJ Faraway's book Extending the Linear Model with R.. A brief mathematical overview of GLMs and how they work. (Book details here).