Ugh recipe-book statistics! This might be useful but not to programmers. No-one should be applying any of the more complex formulas on this page without a good

Ugh recipe-book statistics! This might be useful but not to programmers. No-one should be applying any of the more complex formulas on this page without a good basic grounding in the theory, which is something nearly all programmers will lack (and fair enough). The best place for programmers to start is understanding the basics of likelihood functions, maximum likelihood estimation, Bayes rule and likelihood ratio tests. Then look at e.g. the derivation of the chi-squared test statistic as an approximation to a likelihood ratio test of multinomial distributions to get a sense of where all the mysterious formulas of classical statistics come from.