An Array of Challenges Test Your SAS Skills [Paperback]

Robert Virgile (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 26, 1996

Take a deep breath and prepare to be challenged. This brainteasing book is designed for you to assess your programming savvy through short, fun, and puzzling SAS programming problems. No hardware required! Test your knowledge of arrays; DATA step flow; DO loops; FREQ, MEANS, and SUMMARY procedures; MERGE, OUTPUT, RETAIN, SET, SUM, and WHERE statements; merging data sets; and reading raw data. The pace is yours; every few pages introduce a new problem and solution. To add excitement to the more advanced problems, the author has included the suggested time to beat. Good luck and have fun!

Editorial Reviews

Review

The book has two sections containing basic and tougher problems; they are presented one-at-a-time with their solutions. -- Art Carpenter SAS Consultant

The problem sets in this text are well written and attention-grabbing; it can easily sharpen your SAS® skills. -- Marie C. Martin, Ph.D Physician Health Care Alliance

This is a great book to read! Every problem has a lesson behind it, regardless of your experience level. -- S. David Riba JADE Tech, Inc.

This text is recommended to anyone who thinks SAS® isn’t enjoyable. It enables great selections from a variety of concepts. -- Khosrow Heidari SC SAS Users Group, Chair

About the Author

Robert Virgile

Robert Virgile, an independent SAS trainer and computer consultant,

has 15 years expertise with base SAS programming, along with

extensive graphics and SAS/FSP product experience. Virgile draws

on his experience in working with clients from various industry

sectors on projects involving system design, reporting, and data

management, along with developing and teaching classes. Virgile

pulls his wealth of experience together in this witty yet

challenging book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: SAS Publishing (July 26, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555448062
• ISBN-13: 978-1555448066
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #999,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 3 1/2 Only If You Like Brain Teasers, March 30, 2005

By 

M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: An Array of Challenges Test Your SAS Skills (Paperback)

If you enjoy solving "brain teasers," or bragging that you solved them, then this is the book for you. Robert Virgile compiled 20 intermediate SAS programming problems and 50 advanced ones that are short and deceptively simple. However, they are really geared towards those with advanced knowledge and experience, intermediate level users will get only a few right, and beginners shouldn't even tackle this. (An advanced user will have a thorough command of the intricacies of SAS Language.)

Here's problem number 2, "First Obs Impressions" (Virgile relieves some of the pain through his generally clever problem titles):

"If [data set] OLD contains 100 observations, which of these gets printed?

OPTIONS FIRSTOBS=5 OBS=20;

PROC SORT DATA=OLD OUT=NEW;

BY ID;

PROC PRINT DATA=NEW;

As with most of the examples, the problem is on one page, and the next page repeats the problem and the solution. A problem that Virgile has is that he assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader, and his solutions are often too concise and not written clearly.

The answer, in case you're interested, is 12 observations. Hint: "out of observations 5 through 20 from OLD, those with the 12 highest values for ID." But, will you be interested? There are easier ways to limit observations, but Virgile focuses on the tricky, not the practical. Additionally, while one does learn about the FIRSTOBS= and OBS= options here, the problem and the concepts are poorly indexed in the book.

Here's one more problem, from "Part 2, 50 Tougher Problems."

Virgile write four programs with two lines, and asks you to replace each two-line program with a single line. This is one of the four examples:

IF AGE > 21 THEN DRINKER =1;

ELSE DRINKER = 2;

There are many solution possible for this example, this is one of them: "(AGE >21) =2 * (AGE<=21);." Hint from book: "Take advantage of the fact that the SAS System replaces true comparisons with 1 and false comparisons with 0."

Solving the problem may indirectly improve your understanding of SAS logic and language. It may, at some time, even come in handy. Notice again, however, that the main point of this puzzle is to solve it, not to reduce CPU time, keystrokes, or to generally make you a better programmer. The book has challenging problems, some of which can be instructive, but it is poorly organized and not intended to efficiently or systematically improve your SAS programming. Recommended only for advanced SAS users who enjoy "brain teaser" problems within a SAS context.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable for what it is, a little dated, April 25, 2007

By 

rrhallqu (Durham, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Array of Challenges Test Your SAS Skills (Paperback)

For intermediate to advanced SAS programmers, this is a fun book to push your boundaries a little and try and figure out exactly what SAS is doing. This is definitely far above and beyond the "Little SAS Book" understanding of things, because the problems have a lot more to do with the "how" than the "what".

As the other review indicates, you have to enjoy solving brain-teasers for this to be remotely interesting. Aside from that, the only real problem I had with the text was the somewhat dated coverage in the material. Options and changes that were made in either version 8 or 9 are not here, making some problems a lot easier than the solution implies. I remember one problem using the COMPRESS function now has a single statement solution (instead of what the author provides) because of more recent changes to the COMPRESS function. A few answers are just wrong (using variables lengths, e.g.) in more recent versions of SAS.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this book and picked up a number of useful programming techniques along the way.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful Printing!, January 26, 2008

By 

Wanderer (Who cares where I live?) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: An Array of Challenges Test Your SAS Skills (Paperback)

I will perhaps update this review later to reflect the content of the book, but I first want to state that the typesetting and the physical printing in this text is HORRIBLE. It looks like someone literally made this book by taking blank paper and photocopying an existing edition of the book into this one. There are black lines, shadows, 'ghosts' from page corners and all sorts of horrible markings on nearly all the pages. It looks like a bootleg or something, honestly.

I love the content so far and the book is no disappointment there, especially for the seasoned programmer looking to stump themselves on some difficult trivia. This issue with the printing though, it detracts from the whole thing. Such a shame, because I really wanted to like this book.