What Does This Book Cover?
This book has two goals: the first is to show readers how to use a free version of SAS called SAS OnDemand for Academics, including how to use point-and-click menus to view, summarize, and analyze data using built-in SAS Studio tasks. The second goal is to teach readers how to program using SAS.
The first part of the book shows readers how to register for SAS OnDemand for Academics. The remaining chapters in this section explore how to use the SAS Studio tasks to inspect, summarize, display, and, finally, how to create graphical representations of data.
The second part of the book is an introduction to SAS programming. Starting from basic concepts, this part of the book discusses conditional logic, looping, SAS functions, and some slightly more advanced topics such as how to analyze longitudinal data and transform SAS data sets.
Although this book covers basic and intermediate topics, more advanced topics such as SAS date interval functions and Perl regular expressions are not covered.
Is This Book for You?
This book is appropriate for beginners as well as intermediate programmers. Even people with advanced SAS programming skills might find this book useful to learn how to use SAS Studio tasks in a cloud-based environment.
What Are the Prerequisites for This Book?
There are essentially no prerequisites for people thinking about buying this book.
What’s New in This Edition?
Parts of this book are similar to an earlier book called An Introduction to SAS® University Edition. However, because that book used SAS University Edition while this book uses SAS OnDemand for Academics, it should rightfully be considered a new book and not a second edition of the older book.
What Should You Know about the Examples?
This book includes tutorials for you to follow to gain hands-on experience with SAS. All the programs and data sets used in the text, as well as data used for the end-of-chapter problems, are included in a free download from the SAS author site. Every topic in the programming section is introduced by one or more examples.
Software Used to Develop the Book’s Content
Every program in the book was written and run using SAS OnDemand for Academics, the SAS cloud-based platform.
Example Code and Data
You can access the example code and data for this book by linking to its author page at https://support.sas.com/cody.
SAS OnDemand for Academics
This book is compatible with SAS OnDemand for Academics. If you are using SAS OnDemand for Academics, then begin here: https://www.sas.com/en_us/software/on-demand-for-academics.html.
Where Are the Exercise Solutions?
Solutions to the odd-numbered problems are included at the end of the book as well and in the free download from the author site. Self-learners or instructors can request the solutions to the even-numbered problems by contacting SAS Press.
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