Applied Statistics and the SAS Programming Language (5th Edition) Reviews

• This Book ROCKS! (for a stats/programming book, that is...)

  
  By A1SYLII0808HD6 on 2000-05-23
  I've been doing data analysis for almost 20 years and recommend this highly. It is not too advanced for the beginning college student or professional, but more weighty than the small Introduction to SAS books (which seem more suitable for those with no experience). Because it interweaves SAS programming with often used statistics (and offers excellent examples and interpretations of output throughout), it is ideal for a stats and/or SAS course.

  I find it useful for reviewing SAS steps, and as a quick stats overview. The big SAS books are fine as a reference or for researching more complex and/or narrower questions, but this is far more user-friendly. Highly recommended for the beginning to moderate statistician or programmer.
  
  

• guide to applied stats through the use of SAS

  
  By AQ7ZQWXAYT8HZ on 2008-02-13
  SAS is a data management and statistical analysis tool that is extremely popular in industry especially in medical device and pharmaceutical companies. SAS manuals are very good at providing users who have some statistical knowledge with guidance toward the use of various porcedures. Statistical texts often provide users of statistical methods with the necessary basic knowledge. However there are few texts that do both. A trend is developing to introduce basic and advanced statistical methods illustrated through the use of statistical software (particularly SAS). This book does a great job of presenting many applied problems and demonstrating the implementation of the analysis in SAS.
  
  

• Excellent Introduction

  
  By A3P7MKNJ5FOG41 on 2004-12-07
  I just completed a SAS course that used this book. I never used SAS before and found the book to be very useful and informative. The authors show you how to use the built in SAS procedures and provide basic guidance on how to interpret the results. It has a numerous examples which really helped me learn the basics about running t-tests, ANOVA, and regression. Notes: (a) The book does not cover every option available with the SAS procedures - this is actually good in an introductory book because it keeps the reader from getting confused. Don't buy the book expecting a technical programming manual. (b) The book does not cover macro programming (c) the book does not cover the more professional looking graphics procedures e.g. gplot
  
  

• A good introduction

  
  By A3IO87VEBRSSHP on 2000-06-13
  This is an ideal book for a certain audience, and a good book for many audiences The ideal audience is college-level students or B.A. level professionals who know a little SAS and know a little statistics, and need to know how to combine them. The book is very clear and well organized, and makes no pretence to be what it isn't (i.e. a complete reference to SAS-STAT, a course book in statistics).

  A good companion book would be DiIorio's SAS Applications Programming: A gentle introduction.
  
  

• Good book!

  
  By A1PJJFCH9OXWIB on 2002-05-16
  If you don't have the background of SAS programming. You should read this book. If you have the background of C/C++ and SQL, you will find SAS is very easy to learn.
  I spend less time learning SAS concepts when I read this book. In part 1, the author reviews the basic concepts of statistics when running sas. This is very easy to understand!
  In part 2, he mentions how to infile the large data in the sas environment. You don't have to type all the data in the sas enviroment in the beginning. It is very useful.
  I think this is a good book for beginners who want to know what SAS programming is. I hope the author still can write the book about advanced SAS programming .
  
  
• A once great book whose time has passed
  By A3SDJ70H00OQCJ on 2004-01-22
  Once upon a time, I could not recommend this book highly enough. That's the problem--"once upon a time". In 2004, this book violates what I consider an overriding consideration for instruction books: Never distract the new user with picky details that s/he'll will rarely need in practice.
  
  The first few chapters are written using INPUT and DATALINES; commands to enter data. For those unfamiliar with SAS, that means the authors enter all of their data as lines of text typed inside their command language. No one works that way any more! It's a hold over from the days of punchcards. Does the new user really need to know that
  INPUT ID 1-3 AGE 4-5 GENDER $6;
  means "look in columns 1-3 for a numerical id, columns 4-5 for numerical age, and column 6 for a character designating gender"? When the 4-th edition was written, the answer might have been yes, but even then it would have been given grudgingly. For more than a few years, data almost always arrive as data sets that have already been made into SAS files or as spreadsheets that can be imported directly into SAS. This method of data input would not be a fatal flaw if the material were in a later chapter or an appendix, but it's woven throughout the text starting with the first example on page 3.
  
  I would love to see this book updated with a more modern view to how data are processed and analyzed, but I can no longer recommend it in its current form.
  
  Added in edit: Instead, get a copy of "The Little SAS Book: A Primer, Third Edition" by Lora D. Delwiche and Susan J. Slaughter. If I ever get around to reviewing it, I'll give it 4 or 5 stars. In the meantime, there are already a bunch of reviews you can read on the book's own Amazon web page, mostly good, a few bad, for an average of 4 stars.
  
  
• Helpful and entertaining too (really!)
  By A918P6KPDBN0Q on 2002-02-27
  Cody and Smith do an effective job of communicating the intricacies and features of this helpful but sometimes dense software. A step-by-step, well organized and at times amusing approach to programming in SAS, this book is similar to the "..for dummies" collection - user-friendly with plenty of visuals and examples. I'd definitely recommend it to any student or professional.
  
  
• Highly recommended
  By A6BCNO0R6A5QK on 2006-06-11
  I bought this book a few years ago, and still find myself referencing it more than any other book on the subject. It is a great book for those who use SAS, but do not use it daily. Cody and Smith have converted a difficult and dry subject into something that is as enjoyable to read as can be done given the subject matter. The authors do a fine job of explaining each process, when to use it, and how to interpret the results. Their examples are easy to understand, and the tips they provide are helpful. For instance, when talking about correlation, some other books fail to mention common mistakes made when doing the analysis, such as correlation not implying causality: this book clearly injects this in the chapter and gives a straightforward example to reinforce the point made.
  
  It is an excellent reference manual and deserves a spot alongside your SAS manuals.
  
  
• If only these guys worked for SAS
  By on 2001-08-24
  In short, this is THE book to have if you are a regular person who needs to use SAS. While most SAS applications are a nightmare for all but the full-time statistician/SAS user, this well-written book makes things seem pretty easy. It includes some useful background material on statistical procedures as well as references for the more inquiring mind. This is an essential companion for SAS in the real-world. SAS would do well to take on some of the suggestions in this book.
  
  
• Great reference for SAS beginner
  By A1DLWEQKCZ7DAK on 2005-12-15
  This is a great book for people just starting to work with SAS or people who haven't done SAS in a while. It covers many basic analyses (maybe up to the second basic stats class in graduate school). The only bad thing about this text is that it doesn't cover enough of the multivariate techniques. Nonetheless, great step-by-step how-to for beginners. I highly recommend this text as an introduction or a refresher!
  
  
• no fancy graphics
  By AG35NEEFCMQVR on 2006-07-24
  [A review of the 5th EDITION 2005.]
  
  Cody and Smith refine their text on learning to program SAS. They assume you already know many statistical concepts, including skewness, kurtosis, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Student's T distribution. It is not a book on statistics per se, but how you can use SAS to compute these quantities from your input data.
  
  There is no fancy GUI of graphs taught here. The style of the SAS outputs given in the book reflects in part a legacy of an earlier time when graphical options were very limited. But you need to realise that understanding how to program in SAS does not necessitate nifty graphics. In statistics, a lot of understanding still comes from looking at tabular results, and simple graphics like scatterplots. The book shows how to get such results displayed.
  
  From the programming standpoint, the SAS language is pretty straightforward. Like writing script files. The main point is that the hard conceptual stuff is outside the book's remit. Instead, the book shows how SAS programming lets you handily access the large set of routines SAS has built, to do the tedious or complicated number crunching. It's up to you to decide what routines to use, and to understand the significance of the results.
  
  
• an excellent SAS intro
  By on 2002-02-15
  One of the most heavily used reference books in my office...this is very well written for a programming book. The authors use case examples for illustrating the different programming techniques, which makes it very easily understood by the layman. If you have a basic understanding of statistical techniques such as ANOVAs and t-tests this book will allow you to use SAS fairly easily.
  
  
• Disappointed
  By A2UUBDYN5OCHJ5 on 2008-03-26
  I am disappointed after reading this book. The coverage on statistics is overly superficial. I would be quite hesitating to call it a book on "applied statistics". It's probably better called "Basic Data Analysis Using SAS".
  
  It's a book for users with no experience of either statistics or SAS. It's clearly written. However, the style is old fashioned (the same is for SAS). In recent years, SAS has shifted its focus on so called "enterprise solutions"; therefore the development on data management, statistics, and econometrics has lagged behind, compared to SPlus/R and other more specialized programs.
  
  Similar to most other SAS books, the authors spent a lot of time talking about SAS programming rather than the subject matters (mostly because SAS syntax is very old and different from most other programming languages). The author also spent a lot of efforts talking about data input assuming users are still living in a stone age and have to deal with punched cards instead of delimited data.
  
  
• Good book, poor value
  By AQMQI5K7MNW76 on 2006-10-13
  The book can be helpful to college students, but is of little benefit to more seasoned statisticians. The title notwithstanding, most of its chapters deal with general-purpose SAS programming; the rest (totaling 100-150 pages) offer a very basic review of REG, TTEST, LOGISTIC and FACTOR procedures, something that you can easily find online. (Check out the SAS tutorials offered by UCLA). I like and recommend Ron Cody's other books, but not this ridiculously overpriced (by 100%, I'd say) softcover.
  
  
• Too much unecessary detail about reading in data
  By A3FU75IBJTWXEC on 2006-11-10
  Theres just too much unecessary material in this book about ways to read in data etc. Its all unecessary cos like myself most professional analysts and statisticians have access to SAS enterprise guide, which is incredibly powerful and so much less time consuming. The programming language is only useful for algorithms these days, as most professionals havent got the time to be debugging code all day. The text covers nothing about cluster analysis either which is central to a lot of multi variate analysis.
  The mathematics and statistical detail is of far more interest and importance to us in the working environment than reading in of files.
  
  
• Wonderful book for practitioners
  By A3OTYYUFDAWVHK on 2003-09-17
  I have a PhD in Marketing and MSEE, and because of this, a good, basic knowledge of statistics. Nevertheless, when i started working in quantitative marketing research, i was often posed with practical problems where i didn't have an immediate answer. THis book was often a lifesaver for me. When i ran into a practical problem analyzing data, i could look something up at the right page, and it would give me the basic intuition and workable prescriptions for a wide range of non-trivial, intermediate problems. My impression is that the people giving this book low ratings are looking for statistical theory, which of course this book isn't about. That's like blaming a pick-up truck for not being as sexy as a roadster. If you live in the real world however and don't have days to figure out the theoretical fine points and accompanying SAS codes, but still want to do solid work and get the basic intuition of what you're doing, this book is worth its weight in gold. I used this in market research, but I'm sure this would be valuable in all social sciences, and probably also in other applied fields such as medical statistics, biology, etc.
  
  
• Useful
  By A34WA25ZS8PYHZ on 2007-11-25
  Really good for a start for SAS. You can always turn to it when there is something you do not understand. Thought it is thick.Well, the software is complicated. So enjoy reading it!
  
  
• Applied Statistics and the SAS Prigramming Language
  By on 2003-03-11
  I thought that this was a fabulous book. I used it for work and needed a copy of my own when I left. It was great to learn the language but even better as a reference book while using SAS daily. I can't live without it!
  
  
• Use this text to learn SAS for Statistical Analysis
  By A3PANXNUUHBK31 on 2010-03-18
  Anyone who must use SAS for statistical analysis should use this book in their learning process. Yes, there is "The Little SAS Book" and its variatons, but Cody and Smith have written the best text for quickly learning how to use SAS for statistical analysis. Sometimes, academic authors write for their associates rather than students. These authors have one goal: to help anyone, at any level, learn how to apply SAS for their statistical analyses. Their writing is clear, and anyone with an 8th grade education can use their text. I've used R, Stata, SPSS, and Matlab for statistical analysis. This text is among the best statistical references and learning tools for anyone who must quickly learn SAS.
  
  
• generally useful
  By A7FL7NM4VYOOD on 2009-09-22
  this book is good for an overview of the software, but does not reveal some of the detailed ways it can be used
  
  
• Easy to understand, fun to read
  By A29V9VEO5HBU3I on 2008-06-05
  My prof uses this book as a required text. I am not familiar with SAS but after reading a couple of chapter, this book is really easy to understand. The authors also make it fun to read! Definitely recommend this book, even for the first SAS user.
  
  
• A must-have for beginners
  By on 2003-09-30
  Two years ago, I did not know anything about SAS and was intimidated by the SAS Users' Guide. This book beat several others and became my key reference book. The book is simple, elegant and entertaining. I have recommended it to several of my colleagues.
  
  
• too wordy and extremely basic
  By on 2003-04-30
  I am at a loss to see what people like about this book. The authors were extremely wordy in my opinion and took much too long to make a point. This book is extremely basic, so if you know anything about statistics, I feel you may be happier with something more advanced.
  
  
• Excellent book for the novice and the experienced.
  By on 1998-12-10
  This book provides an excellent introduction to SAS. It melds both the techniques of using the program with the application of it to statistical analysis. As an experienced researcher who has never used SAS, the examples and procedures were clearly described and logically presented. I believe this would be an excellent adjunct to any statistics course. The authors write well and add a touch of humor which departs from the usual arrogance of expertise found in many of the SAS publications that I have seen. I recommend it.
  
  
• An excellent starter, limited use for professionals
  By on 1998-07-28
  A very good intro-level SAS book for SAS freshmen. It helps you to do SAS quickies without learning the language in detail. But wherever it touches the language itself, it provides excellent teaching in easy-to-understand English. It's the best book for non-programmers to start using SAS for their everyday statistic and database tasks. The final part of the book contains some (but very limited) tricks for professional SAS programmers. More advanced contents will earn one more star - wait for the next version.
  
  
• Blergh
  By A1W48EKOPTS2YQ on 2006-09-12
  I did not like this book. The organization was abysmal, and I decided to sell it back to the college bookstore for use by future hapless students, because it is not good as a reference guide.
  
  I did not like how the author seemed to gear the book to an audience that is terrified of their computers or anything dealing with *gasp* math.
  
  
• Poor book
  By A3CDBNKXHDAR32 on 2007-03-20
  I hoped more. It is a very basic book, with elemental examples and no clear directions on the best use of SAS.
  
  
  
• Great!
  By A29MT886IP60YZ on 2009-12-19
  I couldn't believe how fast I got the book, and it was in great shape! Very satisfied.
  
  
• Useful book. Good service.
  By A36BO12YHQCC0I on 2008-10-10
  It's not the newest version, but immensely helpful for basic SAS programming. The vendor was quick and reliable.
  
  
• It's a good complemental book for lectures .
  By A2VNSH7G2G448U on 2006-02-25
  There are a lot of hands-on examples in the book which is good for practice.
  
  

• The Little SAS Book: A Primer, Fourth Edition
• Learning SAS by Example: A Programmer's Guide
• Principles of Biostatistics (with CD-ROM)
• Applied Linear Statistical Models
• Statistical Methods in Education and Psychology (3rd Edition)