SAS Introductory Guide

This is a good SAS introductory book because it contains both basic information for the absolute beginner (e.g., what is a variable?), as well as chapters explaining some of the most commonly used Procedures. The latter include the following: SORT, PRINT, PLOT, FREQ, MEANS, CORR, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and Regression. Although the book warns that it does not teach statistics, it somewhat accomplishes this through explanations of the programming statements and the resulting output. Of course, it is not a substitute for a stats text. Indeed, some of the more complicated stats are reviewed in a cursory manner that was confusing or had little or no explanation: "This pattern might be the result of autocorrelation-we could use the P option in GLM to get a Durbin-Watson statistic to check for this," without any explanation of autocorrelation.For those of us who use datasets that are already set up, the emphasis on inputting cards in the beginning chapters is somewhat annoying. However, this may be more appropriate for students assigned work with small sets of raw data. It's not a very long book, but I recommend it for getting right to several of the most frequently used PROCS. On the other hand, some of the explanations could have been expanded for clarity; it may have been better to cover fewer statistical procedures but to explain each one in a more user-friendly style. Not including the somewhat superfluous Appendices ("Getting Started: The SAS System at Your Installation," and "More About the SAS System") the book is only 89 pages long.