[BeetleB]

Devore's book is great. It's sad it gets many negative reviews. In my experience, there are two types of people:

1. Those who want a statistics book to be like a math book: Fewer words and more equations.

2. Those who want a wordy book with little math

Devore's book is in between, which is why I think both camps tend to hate it. It has a decent amount of math, and has quite a bit of text. The text is invaluable: You get information about common rules of thumb. You get insights on why the technique works. Etc.

And the examples/problems are great. So many of them are from real papers/books. You're not working on some contrived example, but on real world problems.