What is CAST?

CAST stands for Computer-Assisted Statistics Textbooks and consists of a collection of electronic textbooks (e-books). Three e-books cover material in introductory statistical methods courses with data and scenarios from different application areas. Other e-books teach more advanced topics.

Using CAST in a web browser

CAST was originally designed to run within a web browser but needed to use small embedded Java programs (called applets) for its dynamic and interactive diagrams. They used a Java plugin that all browers once supported but browsers are gradually dropping support for Java.

You may find that the applets work in your current browser (a check is made when an e-book is opened) but you will eventually have to change to a different version of CAST.

(However if you want to try CAST in your browser, click the 'e-books' tab at the top of the page to see the list of e-books and start one.)

Stand-alone version of CAST

We strongly recommend that you download CAST and use the stand-alone version in the future.

Since the dynamic and interactive diagrams in the browser-based version of CAST will eventually stop working, we encourage users to download CAST and run the stand-alone version from a local hard disk or file server. This will allow you to use CAST well into the future. The Download tab at the top of this page describes how to download and install CAST.

Licence and copyright

Acknowledgements

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