I personally like Kruschke's Bayesian Data Analysis very much. It does a wonderful job in introducing readers to Bayesian statistics -- a good first text book f

I personally like Kruschke's Bayesian Data Analysis very much. It does a wonderful job in introducing readers to Bayesian statistics -- a good first text book for Bayesian statistics. For a more classic approach to statistics, I also liked Builder's Analysis of categorical data. It's focused on categorical data but does a good job in explaining what's going on. A good introductory book. Both books are well written and really try to explain stuff. IMHO they are two examples of good didactics in statistics. If you're into ML you might want to choose something else though.