It has been a blast to teach my Statistical Programming class this Fall. I got to use my book, Statistical Programming in SAS! This book evolved over many years in response to the development of a class proposed in response to an external program review that noted a gap in our program. While there were a number of excellent SAS books for learning the fundamentals of using SAS, there wasn't a book that developed on the statistical topics that I wanted to include in my class.

I started developing an extensive outline along with programs and slides. A colleague at SAS, Maura Stokes, suggested that my course might be the foundation of a book for SAS Press. I wanted to have a resource and reference that my students could use to learn the basics of constructing programs to solve statistical problems (and even be exposed to some statistical methods that they may not have met before), and so I thought - why not? In addition, I thought a book that introduced some of the new functionality in SAS might be of interest to experienced SAS programmers. After five years, I taught the class four more times, experienced a new release of SAS that included the new ODS Statistical Graphics procedures, and addressed comments from 17 different reviewers in bringing the book to completion and publication last July.

So, 10 weeks into the semester, and the students have not yet held a sit-in or other protests over the use of my book. In fact, I am pleased to see lots of highlighting and dog-eared pages in my students' books. I like how the pacing of the material in the course is complemented by the book (yeah, I know I'm a bit biased). I'm pleased with the material, although I find that I am collecting notes about what I might add or modify in a future edition (if any is written). The Acknowledgments section of the book ended with the sentence – “For the third time, I swear this is the last book I will write” - does writing a second edition count?

For more information about John Bailer, visit his author page