SPSS for Windows Step by Step: A Simple Guide and Reference, 15.0 Update

If you use SPSS for Stats and need a simple, down to earth approach, this is it.

I wish I had this book in my first SPSS class. It is very simple to understand and it takes you step by step with good practice exercises at the end of each section.

SPSS is quite a powerful statistical package. If you have never used it, or any other stats package for that matter, then George and Mallery offer a comprehensive introduction to both SPSS and statistics. The book emphasises what you can do at the graphical level, with the SPSS user interface. Myriad screen captures of menu options, panels and the like. These are given in the context of many tasks that you can do. You should also look at the graphing capabilities. In statistics, visualisation is often necessary, in order to understand the data. As far as statistical theory goes, what is here is really a summary. There is no attempt at proving theorems, for example. But where SPSS shines is in making easily available lots of functions that can be applied to your data. Quicker than you having to code this in some other language. The book does not touch on more advanced and specialised packages available within SPSS. For these, you might look up Norusis' texts. She has written several that are definitive expositions. Another possibility is to look up Using SPSS for Windows and Macintosh: Analyzing and Understanding Data (5th Edition). The presentation in the latter is somewhat like this book, but a little more advanced.