The Little SAS Book: A Primer, Fifth Edition

This is the best book to learn SAS as a begineer. No need to have any prior knowledge in SAS. Read this book and you can work on SAS comfortably. This book will give you enough knowledge to learn more by practicing SAS practically.

I'm a graduate student in the sciences looking to use SAS to "crunch" some of my data. Unfortunately, I've never taken a class in it. This book was recommended to me by the professor that teaches the SAS course at my college. It is extremely helpful and walks you through every step that you need to do to make your data work for you!

I got my first job out of college as a data analyst. After a few days on the job, it felt like I was drowning. The reason is I had never worked before with "real" data. My thin and rather compact SAS book from college (used in an introductory undergraduate stats class) barely did anything to help alleviate the immense pressure that I felt I was under. Then...I bought this book. Knowing the theory and understanding how to interpret statistical test results is only part of the picture (which this book will NOT help you do)...preparing the data for analysis is also very important and this book helped me on that end big time. This book got me there fast and now I can focus more on doing my job rather than staring at the screen wondering how I am going to get my data to the point where it's actually usable. If you are in a similar situation as I was and you need to get up and running with SAS fast, I can only tell you that this book helped remove tons of weight off my shoulders.

This book is a primer - it's own title indicates it as such. A primer is what you give to people to get them familiar with something beforehand. SAS is very powerful but it is not intuitive to use - a la Excel. If you haven't used SAS before, reading over this book is a great way to get familiar with it and a nice reference to have for someone new to SAS programming. I learned how to use SAS from this book and the book covering empirical financial research. The disappointed people here are expecting a bit much from something called a 'primer' or simply don't find SAS easy to use. Neither of these shortcomings are the fault of this work. If you've never used SAS or are very new to it, this book is quite good - and that's what a Primer is for.

When used as a textbook to complement an instructor this book is useful - in two pages you can find a brief explanation and an example to illustrate the point. For a SAS user needing a quick reference - great as well. For someone just sitting down with SAS for the first time with no instruction or experience, this may leave a few holes and many questions, though stepping through the examples step by step (and not trying to get too far ahead of yourself) will tend to answer your own questions. A very useful resource.