Authors: Cody, Ron
Pages: 626
Publisher: Unknow
ISBN13: 9781599941653
I wish that Ron Cody's new book, Learning SAS® by Example: A Programmer's Guide, had been around when I was first learning SAS! This impressive book steadily moves the reader from SAS novice to SAS authority in 26 well-written, well-paced chapters. All of the basics are covered in this book; the fundamentals of the DATA step, getting data into and out of SAS, conditional and iterative processing, SAS functions and formats, important SAS procedures, creating frequency and tabular reports, and generating output in publishable formats such as RTF and PDF. This book is well suited for people who are just learning SAS, as well as for people who would like a broad-based SAS reference. There are plenty of solid examples that emphasize the material in the chapters. Each chapter ends with exercises that test the reader's understanding of the concepts and the SAS code presented. Because of its pacing, breadth, and scope, I have no doubt that Learning SAS® by Example: A Programmer's Guide will become the preferred book for learning SAS software in business, government, and educational institutions the world over. --Michael A. Raithel, Senior Systems Analyst, Westat
Twenty years ago, I learned SAS programming from a book called the SAS Applications Guide, 1980 Edition. Many people, including myself, made careers by learning everything in that book. Ron Cody's Learning SAS by Example: A Programmer's Guide is just such a book for a new generation of programmers. Studying real-world examples is the best way to learn applications programming. The topics Ron has chosen are the most often requested tasks that I am asked to program today. If you learn everything in his chapters on restructuring and combining data and the use of arrays, you will be proclaimed a SAS maven by your colleagues--guaranteed. Experienced programmers will be interested in learning some new features of PROC PRINT and the Output Delivery System. And, yes, maybe you will finally learn to use PROC TABULATE and PROC REPORT because Ron makes these two procedures easy to understand. --Jeanne Spicer, Manager, Data Management and Programming Services, Population Research Institute, Penn State University