Little SAS Book Series

Award-winning books by Susan J. Slaughter and Lora D. Delwiche

There are two types of books in The Little SAS Book family: The original The Little SAS Book: A Primer is an accessible and easy-to-read guide to the SAS programming language while its younger sibling, The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide, covers the point-and-click interface to SAS. Both are published by SAS Press.

The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2

This book has been completely rewritten for Enterprise Guide 4.2 and also applies to Enterprise Guide 4.3. This is the third Little SAS Book for Enteprise Guide.  Previous editions cover Enterprise Guide 3.0 and 4.1.

Data for The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2 Win32 This zipped file contains the SAS data sets used in this book.  The data sets concern the Fire and Ice Tours company and are in 32 bit format. Using these data sets, you can run the examples yourself.

Data for The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2 Win64 This zipped file contains the SAS data sets used in this book.  The data sets concern the Fire and Ice Tours company and are in 64 bit format. Using these data sets, you can run the examples yourself.

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The Little SAS Book: A Primer, Fourth Edition

Winner of the Society for Technical Communications International Technical Publications Competition 2009, Award of Excellence.

Winner of the Society for Technical Communications Carolina Chapter Technical Publications Competition 2009, Distinguished Award.

First published in 1995, this new edition brings The Little SAS Book up to date for SAS 9.2 including ODS Graphics.

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The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.1

Winner of the Society for Technical Communications Carolina Chapter Technical Publications Competition 2007, Award of Excellence.

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Message from the Authors
When we started writing The Little SAS Book in 1992, the typical SAS programmer had a shelf full of SAS manuals that could be measured in lineal feet. Sometimes they had several such shelves. The SAS Language: Reference manual by itself was nearly 2 inches thick and weighed four pounds! This was the environment in which we conceived the idea of a small book that would be easy to use and would cover the most popular and important features of the SAS programming language. We named this book The Little SAS Book as a joke since, at the time, the term “little SAS book” was an oxymoron.

Our vision for The Little SAS Book was based on our experience helping people write and debug SAS programs. The book needed to be small and non-threatening, explain the fundamental concepts, cover each topic in just two facing pages so you could see an entire section at a glance, contain programs that are complete and executable so you could run them and see the results, include explanatory graphics, and avoid jargon as much as possible.

Now there is a new member of The Little SAS Book family: The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide. SAS Enterprise Guide is a point-and-click interface to the SAS System which is another way of saying that it writes SAS code for you. Because SAS Enterprise Guide is a graphical user interface, writing about it required a little different approach. This book is divided into two major parts: a tutorial section and a reference section. The reference section uses the two-page layout that will be familiar to readers of The Little SAS Book. The tutorial chapters are longer, giving step-by-step instructions to guide new users through the most common tasks.

This new book does not replace the original book. If you want to write SAS programs, you should check out The Little SAS Book. If you want to point-and-click your way to reports, analyses, and graphs, then The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide can help you reach your goals. If you’re the kind of person who wants the best of both worlds, then you may want to write programs in SAS Enterprise Guide in which case you can use the two books in conjunction.

Once in a while someone stops us at a conference, or sends us an e-mail message saying that The Little SAS Book has been especially helpful to them. Some people have even told us that The Little SAS Book made it possible for them get their first job. That’s the best part of writing this book–knowing that it has helped people reach their goals.

May all your data be clean,
And all your programs run the first time,

Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche