Understanding Variation, by Donald Wheeler

This book has some great insights into data analysis and process behavior charts. Some would call this a very boring, extremely dry topic; unfortunately, the style in which it was written won’t change many minds. Some really good stuff in here about how to separate signal from noise when examining data. An idea I’ve held for a while is that arbitrary numerical goals can be counterproductive, and this book explains why. Is this a page turner? No. Does it make reasonably complicated statistics much easier to understand? Yes.

First Sentence:

Recently the U.S. Trade Balance for February showed a deficit of 11.4 billion dollars.