Comments on Enterprise Software Doesn't Have to Suck: Learning SAS

Thank you for helpful tips. It was simple to read,...

2011-08-09T07:42:16.790-04:00

Thank you for helpful tips. It was simple to read, but I'd like to add that if your software business needs to be updated try outsource software development.

Hi, and thanks for mentioning our book! In additi...

2011-07-06T18:17:28.164-04:00

Hi, and thanks for mentioning our book! In addition to SAS-X, there is also SAS Community Planet, which is a superset of SAS-X, AFAICT: http://www.sascommunity.org/planet/.

Before you purchase our book, you might look through our blog (sas-and-r.blogspot.com) to see some examples. Code for the examples that are actually in the book can be found at http://www.math.smith.edu/sasr. In addition to the text around the examples, the book also has very brief entries that describe many different tasks and options-- most of these are included in a wiki: http://kenkleinman.net/sasrwiki. So the book is useful if you want it all in one place, but you can have the material for free, more or less.

Happy learning!

As a follow-up, to understand SAS as a programmer,...

2011-07-03T10:00:05.692-04:00

As a follow-up, to understand SAS as a programmer, you should understand that SAS has a built-in do loop, which loops over all the observations (rows) in your dataset one at a time. This means that it only considers one row of data at a time, which is part of the reason that SAS can handle large datasets so effectively.

The built-in do loop can be circumvented -- using, for example, an output statement to force a loop, a retain statement to hold the value of a variable to the next line, or an array statement in conjunction with a do loop to loop over the variables (columns) -- but these efforts are rarely necessary once you become accustomed to thinking in terms of the built-in loop.

Best of luck learning!

For books, there's the ever popular Little SAS Book by Lora Delwiche and Susan Slaughter. The SAS equivalent to R-Bloggers seems to be SAS-X, although it's largely populated by Rick Wicklin's blog. Rather than blogs or meetups, SAS users tend to interact with the SAS-L list-serv and at SAS User Groups.