Learning SAS by Example: A Programmer's Guide

This is an excellent book for learning SAS, and I am highly confident I will know SAS thoroughly by the time I have finished it. With that said, there is something that anyone considering purchasing this book, or who has already purchased this book, should be aware of. Not knowing this could, for some people, be frustrating enough, for some, to at least consider giving up on the whole thing before learning the contents in this book.After receiving the book, one of the first things you will do is to download the (free) data files that go with the problems in the book. Apparently, these were originally on a CD that came with book, but there is no longer a CD, and the files have to be downloaded from the net. That is easy enough to do by following the instructions in the book.Ok, so far no problem. The difficulty occurs when you try to write the first code, on page 5 of the book. The problem is that "infile "c:\books\learning\veggies.txt", as described in the first problem in the book if you are using a (freely downloadable) virtual machine to run it, as is required if you are trying to learn SAS on your home computer, will return a "physical file does not exist" error. Very frustrating. The file is on your computer, you can see it, and yet the program cannot recognize that it exists. I spent quite a few hours trying to figure out what the problem was, and what to do about it. This should be explained in the book, but unfortunately, it is not. Essentially, the data files need to be uploaded into the virtual machine, whichever one you are using. Not "imported", not "downloaded", not referenced to the C drive on your computer as is stated in the book, but uploaded from your C drive to the virtual machine. Here are the steps (after you have already downloaded the data files from the internet to your computer):1. Go to "Myfolders" in the interface, right click on the mouse, and go to "upload".2. Browse to the folder on your computer that contains the data files you downloaded from the internet. Highlight and select all of the files, and upload them to the virtual machine in "Myfolders". You will now see all the files *such as veggies.txt" under "Myfolders".3. Now, in the SAS code window, instead of writing infile "c:\books\learning\veggies.txt", right click on the veggies.txt file in "Myfolders", go to properties, copy the location, and past this into the infile statement. (i.e. something like infile "\myfolders.veggies.txt").NOW you are cooking! It is so simple, yet not at all described in the book, even though this is essential knowledge for almost all SAS users who are learning it on their home computers.For those wanting to learn the language of SAS, and just starting out, an early frustration and setback, where nothing works, nothing is explained, and it is not your fault, can be very frustrating and even discouraging. Hopefully, this post will help others to get up and running with SAS without any hitches. I hope this post is helpful to all.

This book is probably the best place to start if you want to learn SAS programming. You can literally start on page one and work your way through the book. By the end of the book you will be a good intermediate programmer but by no means an advanced programmer. The book is about programming, manipulation of data and presentation of data. You will not learn about statistical analysis at all. Macro programming and Proc SQL are only touched very briefly at the end of the book. This means you have to by separate books to learn those topics. But it is a good idea to read the book before starting on Macro programming.What I like the most about the book is that it is very easy to read and almost everything is well explained. Every chapter ends with a number of exercises and I choose to do almost all of them. The exercises are short and generally easy. In most cased you just have to modify an example form the book to do the exercise. This means the exercises are good to teach you the syntax in the programming. But they are not advanced enough to teach you how to structure advanced programs or think for yourself.The books downside is that it is printed in black and white which is annoying where you read the SAS code. Although it is a less of a problem in this book than in most other programming books printed in black and white. It is apparent that book is getting quiet old. The syntax of the code has not changed, but the book are based on SAS base and not SAS EG which is going to be SAS's primary editor in the future. This means that all the nice features of SAS EG are not mentioned.

I've taken three graduate stats classes that had the students use SAS to do the work. Each prefaced itself by the statement "this is not a programming class." The teacher showed examples of doing multiple linear regressions, logistic regression, Poisson regression, etc., but otherwise we were on our own. What a frustrating trip! Not only does SAS use an ancient 1970's style programming architecture, they reuse keywords radically differently in different contexts, think of data tables differently from other familiar software, and their online help is vast and a mystery in itself. Over half the time I spent in class was just trying to figure out how SAS worked.So I bought this book. It doesn't teach statistics. It teaches the programming architecture behind the software. It does this very well with a logical progression, clear examples, and well-chosen exercises (half with programming solutions). Dedicate a few hours every other day for a few months and SAS will become a useful tool, not a complete burden.Make sure you get the CD. You need it for the datasets used in the exercises.

Great book for working through basics of SAS programming (for programming in Enterprise Guide also). Good clear writing and examples.

Book in excellent condition, as advertised.

Good

good

Loving this book - very helpful go- to guide