This is a thoroughly revamped version (with most innovations probably being due to Rafael Weißbach joining as an author) of a German classic which appeared for the first time in 1979. It addresses the eternal question all statistics textbooks have to face: Which topics from the rich universe of statistical knowledge are relevant for first year business and economics students? On the one hand, the lecturer would like to teach profound skills which are needed in a later, potentially demanding, professional life. On the other hand, it might be desirable not to overload students with theoretical details.

On this scale, the present book leans toward the latter side; it is focused on the basics and provides easy access with many figures, lots of exercises (solutions included) and detailed examples using SAS, Stata and SPSS. In university courses with several hundreds of students, it is often impossible to explicitly teach software skills so the hands-on approach used here will surely be helpful. Somewhat regrettably, the open-source and widespread software R is left aside.

The book starts the conventional way with descriptive statistics (e.g., mean and variance), followed by probability theory and statistical inference. Then, there is material on regression analysis and on some other aspects of descriptive statistics such as indexes and inequality measurement. In general, a beginner might face problems establishing connections between these rather diverse topics. The book tries to give guidance here by providing short introductions to the topics of each chapter and summarizing tables. Each chapter ends with references for further reading. Moreover, the textbook is accompanied by a separate book for formulas and tables.

I very much hope that this new edition will be as successful as the former ones and that students will learn a lot from it.