When we wrote the sixth edition of The Little SAS Book: A Primer, one of our goals was to write it for all SAS programmers regardless of which interface they use for coding: SAS Studio, SAS Enterprise Guide, the SAS windowing environment, or batch. This is harder than it sounds.
The most fundamental concept that students learning introductory SAS programming must master is how SAS handles data. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it is often overlooked by students in their rush to produce code that works. I often tell my class to step back for a moment
Whether you enjoy debugging or hate it, for programmers, debugging is a fact of life. It’s easy to misspell a keyword, scramble your array subscripts, or (heaven forbid!) forget a semicolon. That’s why we include a chapter on debugging in The Little SAS® Book and its companion book, Exercises and
If you have been using SAS for long, you have probably noticed that there is generally more than one way to do anything. (For an example, see my co-author Lora Delwiche’s blog about PROC SQL.) The Little SAS Book has long covered reading and writing Microsoft Excel files with the
In case you missed the news, there is a new edition of The Little SAS Book! Last fall, we completed the sixth edition of our book, and even though it is actually a few pages shorter than the fifth edition, we managed to add many more topics to the book.
One great thing about being a SAS programmer is that you never run out of new things to learn. SAS often gives us a variety of methods to produce the same result. One good example of this is the DATA step and PROC SQL, both of which manipulate data. The
The next time you pick up a book, you might want to pause and think about the work that has gone into producing it – and not just from the authors.
As a fellow student, I know that making sure you get the right books for learning a new skill can be tough. To get you started off right, I would like to share the top SAS books that professors are requesting for students learning SAS. With this inside sneak-peek, you
This blog is co-authored by Susan J. Slaughter and Lora D. Delwiche. SAS Press is now 25 years old. As impressive as that is, a bigger milestone for us personally is that The Little SAS® Book is now 20 years old! We had no idea back then that we would still
SAS Press is now 25 years old! To commemorate this milestone, I decided to research a question that has fascinated me for years: Who was the first person outside of SAS Institute to write a book about SAS? I first heard about this controversy at the Western Users of SAS
For students to become capable data analysts, they need experience that they can take with them into the real world after graduation. By far the most critical skill for their toolkit is learning to work with real-life data. Therefore, it is important from a teaching standpoint that instructors provide students
At California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo the Statistics Department offers two courses on preparation for the Base SAS Certification and Advanced SAS Certification exams, respectively. Each of these courses is 10 weeks long and the topics covered follow the content offered in the certification guides offered by SAS.
Ask any user how they first learned SAS and there’s a good chance they’ll cite The Little SAS Book as a resource they used to get started. Authors Lora Delwiche, Susan Slaughter, and Rebecca Ottesen have written a new book that promises to be just as helpful to new SAS
I think everyone can agree that being able to debug programs is an important skill for SAS programmers. That’s why Susan Slaughter and I devoted a whole chapter to it in The Little SAS® Book. I don’t know about you, but I think figuring out what’s wrong with my program
Our new book, Exercises and Projects for The Little SAS® Book Fifth Edition, includes a variety of exercises to help people learn SAS programming. Rebecca Ottesen, Lora Delwiche and I designed this book so that it can be used either in a classroom setting or by individual readers working alone.
