Customer Reviews

SAS Functions by Example

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This review covers only how well the book helps the user manage the product under question. Many people learn SAS on the job rather than for formal education; this book meets that audience's needs quite nicely.

This book does well what is supposed to do - be a handy desk reference for SAS functions, according to the functions that exist in SAS9. Part of the author's mission is to bring users up to date on the new functions so that they do not labor with a horse-driven carriage when the equivalent of the automobile has arrived. This is particularly true for the new (as of 2005) string and regular expression functionality provided in SAS9.

Furthermore, By providing good usage examples, he also illustrates not only the definitions of the various functions, but also helps the user select the right one for the job at hand. It's a great book to have at one's side while using SAS.

I have been using SAS for about 18 months and I have found this book to be the best reference in our arsenal. The multiple examples provided with the code explanations set this book apart from references I have found online or through SAS.com. I found the Chapters 1 and 2 essential to my work with string variables (in my case, mostly address information) but all of the other chapters have been useful. Once you outgrow the SAS Primer, this is a must.

An excellent book. For each function, the author provides, not just explanations, but also complete examples and mini-programs, with inputs, code, and actual results. The best resource on SAS functions that I am aware of.