Customer Reviews

SAS For Dummies

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book should be titled "SAS Enterprise Guide for Dummies", not "SAS for Dummies".

If you are looking for a beginner's guide to SAS Enterprise Guide, this is a good choice. However, if you are looking for a guide to classic SAS, the SAS Datastep language, Proc SQL, etc... this is not the book you want.

This book is going back to the store. It is not a guide to SAS but to SAS Enterprise. Thank goodness a colleague quickly short circuited my learning curve on this book. He told me as I sat with a data set about to plunge in. We don't even have Enterprise on our company computer.

Too bad...I had high hopes.

SAS For Dummies, like all of the books in the Dummies series I've read, is an enjoyable to read, easy to understand introduction to a broad and complex topic. As some have mentioned, the focus of this book is not on "SAS programming." Rather it covers getting your analysis and reporting work done using some of the newer offerings from SAS in the "business intelligence" area, including Enterprise Guide and other products. There is, however, a helpful chapter on what kinds of programming tasks can be done by more advanced users and what long-time SAS programmers may miss. (For a good book on SAS programming, I'd recommend The Little SAS Book). Also included in SAS For Dummies is good coverage of data integration, "Stored Processes" for analysis and reporting, and 2 chapters on analytics. These 2 chapters are especially helpful as an introduction to difficult concepts. Overall, this book provides a helpful overview of getting your data manipulation, analysis, and reporting tasks done with SAS, and a no-nonsense, nuts and bolts understanding of some of the newest software from SAS.

I purchased this book based on the title and the description provided by Amazon, although I have no clue where they got it. However, while I was looking for a book that described SAS, the language, this book describes SAS, the Windows interface. There is nothing in this book about the actual SAS language, so if that is what you're looking for, like I was, then steer clear of this! Somewhere on the cover or in Amazon's description of this book, there should be a big, red, warning label making sure that you are aware that really this is SAS (Windows) for Dummies!! I guess, in my case, the dummies part was pretty descriptive! I also will never, ever, buy another "for Dummies" book. There is $30 + shipping and handling down the drain.

SAS for Dummies was great!!! It provided the information to jump-in and get started. But it should be called SAS Enterprise for Dummies as much of the book is dedicated to using SAS Enterprise rather than Base SAS.

SAS for Dummies may seem like an oxymoron, but this book was very useful at bringing a formerly frustrated user like me back to SAS from S, Systat, and Minitab.

When I had tried SAS a few years ago, it was very heavy on programming and learning a fairly complex language (the SAS language.) As a social scientist whose forte isn't programming (I found the syntax and many manuals! of SAS programming very difficult to pick up and use), I wanted easy access to data importing, data management, graphics, and statistical analysis. This book and the new SAS product covered in this book actually fits the bill (Enterprise Guide.)

Overall, I like the main product in the book and found the sections on importing and managing data good introductions to something that used to be incredibly hard with just SAS programming. The book requires no programming, but does have a chapter for those who already program in SAS or want to run old SAS programs in EG.

I really like that I can create many of the graphs that I spent hours or days before in just a few minutes. The book also has a nice overview of many statistical analyses, including a few techniques I may able to add to my work in the future.

After just a few weeks, I can see the real value of SAS since it so much easier to do my work with Enterprise Guide. I can transition much of my simple and advanced analysis to SAS. I highly recommend this book if you are in a similar situation and need to manage, graph, and analyze your data all in one application.

I thought this book will be rich with examples, and tutorials. But unfortunately, the book was lake to examples which means there is no download for the examples or sample of the Datasets. It is said "samples comes with the SAS package." My package is different from the book which make it very hard to track it.

The delivery took about 15 days, while other stuff that I bought later from Amazon delivered faster.

Without any offense to anyone, this book and the delivery is suck.

This is the only book in the ...for Dummies series that I have not liked. I have taken 5 or 6 advanced statistics course over the years and found this book to be helpful with very few topics. There is little real world explainations and the SAS code explanations are poor. I have loaned it out to several other graduate students and none of them have failed to return it within minutes of borrowing it. A good book is usually gone until you go get it back from them. I am just waiting to have someone buy it from me online so I can get something useful out of it.

This was a great introduction to the SAS Enterprise Guide and it's advanced features. The authors present the information in a through and easily understandable manner. If you are not familiar with SAS - SAS Enterprise Guide includes BASE SAS and a lot more. This book will not teach you to code - instead it guides you through the SAS Tasks that write the SAS code for you. Then you can use the SAS code in other tasks so you can quickly learn to program. When learning SAS programming - this can be extremely helpful. Also ... there is a lot of helpful information about statistics, business intelligence, and reporting.

The 2nd edition of this book has the same terrible title as the first. It should have been called SAS Enterprise Guide for Dummies because it has little information on coding in SAS and a lot on the Enterprise Guide (EG) 4.2 graphical user interface. The book walks you through the range of basic tasks to be done prior to data analysis using EG. Topics from importing, to subsetting/combining data sets, to producing web pages with summary statistics and graphics are covered in an easy to read format. The second edition does not add a lot of new material (one stand out thing is an example on using new SAS graphics code). So don't bother picking this up if you have the first edition.

While I like this book, there are a couple weaknesses. There is not enough information on how to check the quality of your data. While the author explains how to make basic subsets of data, there is not enough guidance on how to do more complicated subsetting. For example, taking a subset of records/subjects from a data file using an average is doable using the graphical user interface in EG but the book only mentions it in the context of writing code. Another problem is in the lack of information on doing statistics. If you need a book on analysis this is not a particularly good choice because the discussion is limited to very basic correlation, regression and ANOVA. On the other hand, the author focuses in on basic data validation and the tools needed to check statistical assumptions. So, this combined with a "real" statistics book is an excellent combination. There are a couple of sections that I have not seen written up in any other SAS book including working with OLAP and integration with MS Office as well as a brief introduction to SAS Enterprise Miner.

So, overall this is a good introductory book for the money.