Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
Maybe you shouldn't waste your money. Believers use books like that for validation, but what does it really accomplish? If the divine origin/inspiration of the Bible could be proved so easily to non-believers, everyone would be a Christian. It's akin to using historical sources from before the dark ages to try to prove the existence of ghosts. I have no idea if ghosts exist, but ancient history, no matter how many instances of hauntings it presents, is not a basis for believing in ghosts. The world seems to work just fine without needing to assume that ghosts exist. The fact that some people die with no obvious physical cause is not evidence for soul-snatchers. The fact that piles of books sometimes fall over after days or months of being undisturbed is not evidence of ghosts. A book on documented hauntings won't change my mind. A poltergeist taking up residence with me, however, would change my mind.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/You'd pay for a book describing the scientific method? There's no magic to it. It's common sense.
The process tends to start with a hypothesis/theory. With major breakthroughs, scientists often get new ideas as if by black magic (some sort of subconscious mixing and matching of ideas/models taken from other areas -- math for instance -- with prior informal observations of a phenomenon). Or a hypothesis can be generated by looking at formally-collected data, but that data must not then be reused to test the hypothesis. Or a hypothesis can be from some other scientist, and the goal can be simply to test that hypothesis with a new, hopefully independent data set.
So you have a hypothesis. Then you design some way to test it. You implement the experiment, collect data, and make sure that the data match the theory to within the experiment's margin of error.
If the data don't support the hypothesis, sometimes scientists give up on the idea, or sometimes they adjust the hypothesis and retry (but ideally with new data, since the old data influenced the new version of the hypothesis).
Fetishization of the scientific method really annoys me. The scientific method is a fluid process that doesn't always start at the first step (hypothesis formation) because often scientists start with an externally-provided hypothesis (when testing someone else's theory, for instance). Or sometimes they unexpectedly find a new way to collect data... and they just re-check a prior hypothesis to make sure it holds with the new data. All the pieces (hypothesis, data, test) have to be there, but not all have to be actively pursued. Sometimes data just fall from the sky like apples without being sought. Hypothesis formation, when a hypothesis is not explicitly taken from elsewhere, is hardly a formal procedure.
The scientific method is more of a framework for communicating scientific results so that the result can be reviewed for bias and independently retested. It's not how science operates. It's just the method by which science is communicated between different people or groups, to try to minimize quackery, unintentional and intentional bias.
