There is a vast literature. Here we point to a few works which we have found useful, binning these into five types: popular, the basic text, the rigorous text, the data analysis manual, and the books of specialist interest to astronomers.

1. classic popular books have legendary titles: How to Lie with Statistics (Huff 1973), Facts from Figures (Moroney 1965), Statistics in Action (Sprent 1977) and Statistics without Tears (Rowntree 1981). They are all fun. A modern version with a twist in the title is Seeing through Statistics (Utts 1996), which entertains, serves as a statistics primer, and is almost a member of the next group.

2. come in types (a) and (b), both of which cover similar material for the first two-thirds of each book. They start with descriptive or summarizing statistics (mean, standard deviation), the distributions of these statistics, then moving to the concept of probability and hence statistical inference and hypothesis testing, including correlation of two variables. They then diverge, choosing from a menu including analysis of variance (ANOVA), regression analysis, non-parametric statistics, etc. Modern versions come in bright colours and flavours, perhaps to help presentation to undergraduates of a subject with which excitement is not always associated. The value of many such books is exceptional because of the sales they generate. They are complete with tables, ready summaries of tests and formulae inside covers or in coloured insets, and frequently arrive with CDs and floppy disks including test datasets. […]