And the winner is…The Little SAS Book

We are pleased to announce that The Little SAS Book: A Primer, Fourth Edition has been awarded the Excellence Award in the Society for Technical Communications International Technical Publications Competition for 2008-2009. The book was also awarded the Distinguished Award for 2008-2009 by the Society for Technical Communications Carolina Chapter. The authors wish they could have accompanied the book to the competition, but it is apparently a publications-only event.

The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.1 won the Excellence Award from STC CC back in 2007.

Updated June 10, 2009.

Free document Coming to SAS from SPSS for programmers

Coming to SAS from SPSS: A Programming Approach is now available as a free download. This 28 page document is designed to smooth the transition for programmers who know SPSS and want to learn SAS. It will also help people who already know SAS but need to use SPSS data files. Some of the features in this document are either undocumented or minimally documented.

We hope, of course, that some people who read this document will decide that they want to know more about SAS, and will buy The Little SAS Book, but that won’t be the case for everyone. For some people this document combined with SAS Help and Documentation will be all they need to get their work done.

Click the image of the title page to connect to the SAS Press Companion Site for this document.

A New Beginning: EG 4.2

We are continuing to work on The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2. I’ve lost track of the number of contracts we’ve signed–five, I think. I do have EG 4.2 running on my own computer–sort of–so I have begun writing. I await (with bated breath) a laptop on loan from SAS Institute which should have a fully functional copy of SAS 9.2 and EG installed on it complete with metadata. The theme for this book seems to be “What will be will be.” To say that writing this book requires patience would be a gross misrepresentation; languid acceptance of cosmic capriciousness would describe the experience better. Some things are not meant to happen quickly; only the foolish fight fate. However, while we don’t yet have functioning software or a firm list of changes to the book, we DO have a cover! This image is the official cover for this as yet nonexistent book. Let it not be said that we have made no progress.  Updated June 1, 2009