Classic Books on Statistics and Hydrogeology – in German
The book-recommendations on this book are among the most popular posts on this blog:
- my list of rcommended hydrogeology books;
- individual book reviews of “bottled and sold”, “bottlemania” “numbers rule your world” or “just enough”;
These recommendations so far have all been for books written in english. They are not all purely technical books or particularly textbooks. However, they are all related to the theme of “water”, despite my hands-on quantitative-statistical take on that theme.
Two things happened in the recent past: I realized that I use wikipedia for surprisingly many tasks. I realized that I haven’t used a book in ages for example to look up a distribution function. The other thing that happened, just the other day, was that I took a fairly old programming book, because I wanted to re-read on a certain topic. And I knew it was covered in that (old) book well.
That’s when I thought, that I really like well written books, despite the wickedness of the internet (despite the fact that it recently was claimed to be dead – or not). Then I wondered, what are the best German written books related to the subject I am working in and which also is the topic of this blog? Of course, this is a tough question. And the two books I am going to name in a second are most likely not the only ones. However, they are the two that came to my mind immediately:
The statistics book appears a bit daunting at first with its 1145 pages. I don’t believe it is possible to read the entire book and neither it is recommended by the authors. However, it has happened to me many times that I was looking for a certain topic, like “How does the Wilcoxon Rank Test work?”, and sure enough I found theory for the test as well as an example in the book.
In contrast to statistics, hydrogeology is not as clearly defined. It’s much harder to distinguish a given topic to be or not to be “a hydrogeology topic”. Hence it would seem much harder to write a book on “hydrogeology”, because it would have to cover many topics. However, Hölting and Coldewey have done an excellent job to explain in short and precise language the basics of hydrogeology, from geology, well hydraulic to chemical aspects. It deserves special mentioning that there is a nice chapter on practical aspects, for example on how to get water out of the ground or groundwater protection.