ANOVA has more elegant forms that appear in later chapters. It also forms the basis for regression analysis, a statistical technique that has many business applications; it is covered in later chapters. The F-tables are also used in testing hypotheses about regression results.
This is also the beginning of multivariate statistics. Notice that in the one-way ANOVA, each observation is for two variables: the "x" variable and the group of which the observation is a part. In later chapters, observations will have two, three, or more variables.
The F-test for equality of variances is sometimes used before using the t-test for equality of means because the t-test, at least in the form presented in this text, requires that the samples come from populations with equal variances. You will see it used along with t-tests when the stakes are high or the researcher is a little compulsive.
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