83 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SAS APPEAL, January 14, 2005
This review is from: The Little SAS Book : A Primer, Second Edition (Paperback)
SAS APPEAL
One of the best introductions to SAS, the "little purple book" is now in its 3rd edition (November 2003; ISBN: = 1590473337). Compared with the previous version (this one)," the 3rd edition includes more information on preparing reports and tables, and exporting data. However, the basic format and organization is the same.
This book is organized into 8 chapters, with six appendices, and an index. The overall organization is clear-- one topic leads clearly to the next (contrast this with the overly concise "Getting Started with the SQL Procedure," also by SAS). The book clearly assumes no previous SAS knowledge, although covering operating systems (e.g., Windows, your local workstation or mainframe) is beyond the book's scope. Previous experience with any data entry, data management, or programming will be very helpful, but is not essential. Each chapter is organized into two-page topics (these range from 7 topics in the MACRO chapter to 20 in the overly long data entry chapter) with introductory paragraphs, examples that include a small data set, and programming related to the topic. Programming language related to the new topic is shaded to distinguish it from material already covered or otherwise irrelevant. Because of the mini-data sets for each topic, you don't have to keep returning to datasets presented at the beginning only (as you do with some introductory texts). The reason for using the language, the data, the example, and the output are all there on the 2 facing pages; it's very easy to use.
In 217 well-written pages, the book advances from the very introductory (e.g., every SAS line ends with a semicolon; think of columns as variables, and rows as observations) to techniques (e.g., the chapter on MACROS) and programming "tricks" useful to those with years of experience (the too-brief chapter on debugging programs, the section on the always difficult MERGE statement). This is the challenge of an introductory book: It needs to teach the basics, but not so basic that one can finish the entire book in a couple of hours. Delwiche and Slaughter handle this task superbly. Chapter 1, for example, explains basic SAS concepts (the database, the data step, procedures, viewing and printing output), and a few pages on SAS for Windows. (The authors occasionally refer to SAS for Windows ("PC SAS"); this is valuable for those who have this software but otherwise extraneous.) Still, after nearly 15 years of SAS experience, I turn to this book when I want a concise yet easily understood explanation of something I may have not used for awhile. After mastering this book, I recommend that users follow it with the somewhat more advanced "SAS Programming for Researchers and Social Scientists" (Paul Spector) and/or "Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques (Ron Cody).
Chapters are as follows (I've added a sample topic in parentheses after each chapter title):
1. Getting Started Using SAS Software ("The Two Parts of a SAS Program")
2. Getting Your Data into the SAS System ("Reading Raw Data...")
3. Working with Your Data ("Subsetting Your Data")
4. Sorting, Printing, and Summarizing Your Data ("Summarizing Your Rata with PROC MEANS")
5. Modifying and Combining SAS Data Sets (Combining Data Sets Using a One-to-Many Match Merge")
6. Writing Flexible Code with the SAS Macro Facility ("Macro Concepts")
7. Using Basic Statistical Procedures ("Using PROC REG for Simple Regression Analysis")
8. Debugging Your SAS Programs ("DATA Step Produces Wrong Results but No Error Message")
The book's main problem is Chapter 2. The lengthy material on inputting data will be irrelevant for most students, as datasets are often already prepared. Still, because one may sometimes need to create a dataset, the chapter is useful. In addition, chapter 8, doesn't contain include enough on error detection and debugging programs, an extremely important SAS skill that helps one detect and distinguish programming and dataset errors. Also the Appendix on resources, "Where to Go from Here," mentions SAS Institute published books only, although this is partly due to the paucity of well written SAS books by independent authors when the second edition came out in 1998 (compared with today). Overall, while this much-loved book is much loved by those who took their first SAS steps with it. I recommend the new edition (3rd) edition; it has more topics and is more current, for only slightly more money.
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Out-of-date, but still usable, June 30, 2003
This review is from: The Little SAS Book : A Primer, Second Edition (Paperback)
This Second Edition is good for up to SAS 8.x. For 9.x, you may want to wait until the Third Edition comes out in August, 2003. Also, SAS indicates that there is a "Revised" Second Edition (ISBN: 1-59047-113-X). However, I have not read it and don't know if it is better than its predecessor.
This book (2nd ed.) is very thorough on the "operational" commands, but less so on the "statistical" procedures, which seems to be the whole point of using SAS. Any experienced programmer should be able to do file I/O, data selection, and report formatting in a day or two after reading this book. But to do even something as simple as a t-test, you will have to pull that information from other sources. The authors claim that "[o]nce you have mastered the procedures in this book, the other statistical procedures should feel similar". I tend to agree with them, but I still think that such intended omission is a shortcoming. And for that reason, I give this book a 4 out of 5.
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