“Growth Curve Modeling” is a branch of statistical analysis that deals with time series data from which it tries to extrapolate the long-term trends. This is right now a very active area of interest, both theoretically and practically. The applications of this analysis can be found in finance, biology, and even search engine optimization.

This textbook is a very good introduction to the growth curve modeling. It is written on an upper undergraduate or introductory graduate level. The book is, in my estimate, moderately mathematically intensive. You should definitely be familiar with calculus and several other sophisticated mathematical techniques. However, this is not a “theorem and proof” kind of mathematical book. The aim is to provide the student with the applicable mathematical derivations that can be implemented in the real world problems. Most of the chapters deal with the mathematical derivations of the key concepts, but two of the chapters are more applied.

The textbook relies on SAS programming language, which is sort of indicative of the kind of audience at which it’s aimed. SAS is a proprietary statistical programming language, and it’s commonly used in academic, economics and research environments. However, this is not a programming-heavy textbook and the SAS code examples are used primarily to illustrate the main points in the book.

The book is very well written and it is fairly pedagogical. It can be used as a very good course textbook, a self-paced learning manual, or a general reference on this topic.