Customer Reviews

Sharpening Your SAS Skills

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

 

 

I think this is a good SAS book to have, in particular
I really like the scope of it. The authors have put
together a pretty wide range of the most important, core
topics: report writing, debugging, a lot of data
manipulation, including array processing, a little
SQL, and other essentials (stats, macros, and graph
are not discussed, mainly base SAS).

Though I am a fan of books that focus on new coding
tricks and such, I appreciate how this one reviews the
system processing for each step, besides showing
examples. For instance, WHERE vs IF statement
processing is compared, SQL vs the Data Step, etc. Understanding
this is necessary to become efficient and creative in SAS programming.
Some minor issues including some typos, and I agree
it's a bit pricey, but overall a good, informative book

A perfect guide for efficient SAS programming. This book contains a huge collection of tips, techniques,and examples which are very usefull in the real SAS programming world. The authors are very friendly and do respond for all your questions and detailed clarifications needed on any topic from this book.

This book contains a lot of important SAS features and functions that are a helpful resource to SAS programmers. The authors use many good, clear examples demonstrating the features they discuss. The chapter comparing data step SET and MERGE statements with PROC SQL is very helpful. Also, the data manipulation and SAS reporting tools chapters provide many useful features in summary form.

I found this book very helpful for me as an intermediate SAS user with ~4 years experience. I particularly like those graphs that show you what SAS does when you submit a proc command, which helps me better understand what SAS does in the black box and inspire me to program more efficiently. I also enjoy those small tips throughout the book. If I had this book when I first learnt SAS, it would've saved me lots of time on exploring.

I have found this book to be very useful for systematically refresh my SAS knowledge, especially those SAS skills that I do not use very often in my daily work. Those skills can be very important for a new task and are required for passing SAS certification examination. The 150 challenging questions are particularly useful for the later purpose. I believe that people with an intermediate level of SAS knowledge will benefit a lot from this book and find their SAS skills advanced significantly after going through the book.

A very good book for all level SAS programmers. It covers lots of examples and comparisons, which help you to truly understand how SAS thinks. This is very important to write efficient and correct SAS code.

This is very useful book for SAS programmers at any level of experience. I liked in particular the questions at the end of each chapter. This enabled me to understand the concepts better. I used this book a lot while preparing for the SAS BASE certification exam and it puts you in right direction in achieving the certification.

I have used SAS for more than five years. After I finished reading this book, I felt I would save at least two year working experiences if I had this book early. If you are not good at SAS skills and you are beginning of user of SAS, you must read this book. The reasons are:
1) It gaves your whole picture of the processes of using SAS. This is very important for newer since you do not know where to start from.
2) In each process stage, it summarized all the common SAS syntax or procedure that you want to use to fulfill them.
3) Most of important, it highlights the important concept or minor difference between two function similar syntax that you actually needs many years of real practices to master them.
4) It is a good reference book putting aside of you so that you can get quick reference.
5) In addition, the questions at the end of each chapter will help you prepare your SAS license exam test too.
After you finish reading this book, you will burst your SAS power quickly and you may find good job or get quick promotion. It is a good investment to buy it now.

The primay problem with this book is that, between pages with good examples, it has pages with compact rules without examples.

Instead of paying the outrageous price of this book, you want to buy THE LITTELE SAS BOOK, SAS PROGRAMMING BY EXAMPLE, or SAS FUNCTIONS BY EXAMPLE. They are overpriced too but they have better examples.

This book is described as an intermediate to advanced book, but I didn't find this to be true. This book is more for the beginner to intermediate SAS user, but it is a poorly organized and watered down version of other SAS books. There is nothing novel about this book at all. I don't get why it's so expensive either. I am returning mine to the publisher.