GENSTAT is a general purpose statistical computing system with a flexible command language operating on a variety of data structures. It may be used on a number of computer ranges, either interactively for exploratory data analysis, or in batch mode for standard data analysis.

The great flexibility of GENSTAT is demonstrated in this handbook by analysing the wide range of examples discussed in Applied Statistics - Principles and Examples (Cox and Snell, 1981). GENSTAT programs are listed for each of the examples. Most of the data sets are small but often it is these seemingly small problems which involve the most tricky statistical and computational procedures. This handbook is self-contained although for a full description of the analysis and interpretation it should be used in parallel with Applied Statistics - Principles and Examples.