SAS Functions by Example [Paperback]

Ron Cody (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 30, 2004

Ron Cody's SAS Functions by Example is a must-have reference for anyone who writes programs in Base SAS. From ABS to ZIPSTATE, more than 180 of the most useful SAS language functions are clearly defined and illustrated with fully annotated working programs. Written as both a reference manual and an instructional guide, this book contains many helpful features, including functions arranged by category; coverage of 48 functions that are new for SAS 9.1; a tutorial on Perl regular expressions; extensive sample programs featuring each of the functions; tips to show you novel ways to use functions or to use several functions together to achieve the result you want; a list of programs; an alphabetic list of all the functions in the book; and a comprehensive index of functions and tasks. Beginning and seasoned SAS users will benefit from this comprehensive and useful reference guide to SAS functions!

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ron Cody makes functions, both old and new, easy to understand. He starts with the purpose of a function and follows up with a short SAS program to display how and when it can be used. The format used in this handbook makes finding a particular function and learning its use by example easy. Similar functions and Call routines are treated as a group. First there is an explanation of the appropriate use for each. Then a sequence of sample programs demonstrates how they differ. Dates are often key variables in the programming world. Date and time functions are covered in detail and excellent examples for each function are included. This is truly a handbook to have handy, when you want to choose right function for a task and use it correctly. --Karol Katz, Dept. of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University

I was particularly impressed with two areas of this book: The examples pose problems that every programmer has faced and the solutions address those problems using both traditional approaches and novel strategies. Programmers in their early stages often don't recognize the benefits of using functions. Ron has presented the examples in a way that allows programmers to consider functions from the angle, 'Ok I've got this same problem. How can functions help me treat it?' The text explanation with accompanying code makes it a snap to apply the techniques to your own programs. The examples don't let you assume what the outcome will be and Ron alerts you to any side-effects or unexpected results. Programmers in later stages of development often rely on the same traditional bag of functions, supplemented with lots of work-around code. These professionals will find relief using 'alternative therapies' like Perl expressions and new v9 functions presented in the book. In the old days, data was usually entered by trained personnel using set protocols. Today programs need to be able to accept data entered by untrained users from web-forms. This has resulted in a plague of bad data. Ron's book provides a function Rx for almost every conceivable data entry malady. I've been programming in SAS for about 15 years and found myself saying over & over again 'I didn't know about that function, I can use that!' --Jeanne Spicer, Social Science Research Institute, Penn State University

Ron Cody has done a great job of putting together a SAS Functions "cookbook" that will be a big time saver when trying to easily use and transform your data. There are examples for every function and each is well-explained and easy- to-follow. The author is well experienced in many types of data and programming languages. For example, in chapter 2 he concentrates on Perl expressions and chapter 12 is devoted to trigonometric functions. This book would appeal to beginning and seasoned SAS programmers, as it is very difficult to remember how to use every function you'd need to complete assignments. Just like it would be very hard to remember the details of all your favorite recipes, this book is a similar reference. --Diane Marie Goldschmidt, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of CT

About the Author

Ron Cody, Ed.D., is a professor and researcher at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey as well as a national instructor for SAS Institute Inc. A SAS user since 1977, Ron has the extensive knowledge and innovative style that have made him a popular presenter at local, regional, and national SAS conferences. He has authored or coauthored numerous books such as SAS Programming by Example; Applied Statistics and the SAS Programming Language, Fourth Edition; The SAS Workbook; The SAS Workbook Solutions; Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS Software and Longitudinal Data and SAS: A Programmer's Guide as well as countless articles in medical and scientific journals.

Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: SAS Publishing (January 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590473787
• ISBN-13: 978-1590473788
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,034,879 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Handy book for those with SAS Experience, March 25, 2006

By 

C. Ang "cliff_ang" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: SAS Functions by Example (Paperback)

I used this book the first few hours that I received it. This is not a stand alone book for those that want to learn SAS functions. I think this text is best suited for people who use SAS regularly and needs a handy reference while programming. Skimming through the book would also provide the reader with an understanding of what functions SAS is capable of doing. However, it is highly likely that you will not use all of the programs, most of the programs are pretty useful especially to those that are required to manipulate data in SAS.

18 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too simple too Narrow, October 9, 2005

By 

J. Wang "Doofus" (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: SAS Functions by Example (Paperback)

This may be a good reference book if your entire SAS experiences have been or will be dealing with text characters without any messy computation or you have never and will never write your own code based on new algorithms like what we are encountering everyday in academic under the supervision of innovative professors, or if your entire job is exclusive to handle one or two SAS procedures.

If your job or your mind is not so boring, then this book is probably NOT a good reference. A simple example, after you read the whole book, you DO NOT know how to find the probability, say P(X<=x), of a particular distribution X given x, nor could you know how to find a quartile. Even though this book emphasizes on functions dealing with characters, you will not know from this book how to put together two character variables. The author put a whole chapter telling you how to generate Normal and Uniform random variables while didn't bother to enumerate the ways to generate other distributions. You do not know how to generate a binomial or a Poisson or a Gamma or a Beta or a Chi-square ... I can hardly imagine what these SAS experts are doing everyday with SAS? We do not need a book or a whole chapter of a book to learn how to create Normal or Uniform distribution. A Google search gives more comprehensive results than Mr. Cody's whole chapter. What we need for a reference book is a complete list of all available SAS random variable generating functions which takes less than one page, which will save readers a great deal of time on no-clue searching, which is exactly what a reference book all about, and which unfortunately is exactly what this book has failed to do. A GOOD reference book should go even more beyond. In addition to the complete list, a friendly author would also let readers know how to indirectly generate some distributions that could not be generated directly by existing SAS functions, Inverse Gamma is a good starting point since it is very popular in the Bayesian computation while no SAS function can create it directly.

Lacking of both basic and very useful functions is particularly not acceptable for this book because allegedly it has been especially designed to serve for any level SAS users.

Today there are tons of people who claim they are SAS professionals, have been using SAS for xyz years. I personally know a handful of them. Most of them fall into one of the following categories:

1. Doing exclusive with SAS data step, and not familiar with anything else;

2. Working with one or two SAS proc's, and not knowing anything else;

3. Displaying SAS graphs in a fashion way, and not knowing anything else.

4. Adding some lines to existing SAS programs routinely, and thus believing he is an experienced SAS programmer, even though he is highly unlikely to know how to write a simple code on his own, for example to compute the sum of integers from 1 to 100, without using Data step.

.....

Those people have hardly exposed to anything outside their narrow and exclusive SAS environment and if those people say well to this book, you make your own decision.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good reference book, December 15, 2007

By 

Ujjwal Subedi (Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: SAS Functions by Example (Paperback)

Spend over ten hours going over the book as soon as I got, found it very well written and filled with simple examples. I have been using SAS for two years including few SAS functions like time and date, statistical and others. Good book for beginner programmer like me.

Don't know how useful this would be for people with extensive SAS experience.