Applications, Basics and Computing of Exploratory Data Analysis

In 1977 John Tukey published the orange book EDA with Addison Wesley. It was his attempt to put together all the useful ideas that came out of his research in data analysis over at least the preceding 20 years. Tukey's book was unconventional and confusing to many. Velleman and Hoaglin wrote the ABCs of EDA to try to make the ideas more palitable for the masses that practice statistical methods. The book was hailed as a great success in that regard. Although antiquated by today's standards the authors had several Fortran programs for the analyses. This book is interesting to have only from an historical perspective. Today the stem-and-leaf plots, the box plots and many of the other great ideas of EDA are implemented in standard packages such as SAS. This book was an important achievement as it sped up the usage of EDA. Also these authors got experience at expository writing of elementary statistics which served them well in their later publications.