 |
Authorline (AL): Please share some of the updates that have been included in this fourth edition of The Little SAS Book: A Primer.
- Susan Slaughter (SS): The biggest change in this edition is that we have added ODS Graphics. ODS Graphics is a whole new way of making graphs, and we think SAS users will like it a
lot. With ODS Graphics you can add sophisticated graphs to the output of existing statistical procedures, or create stand-alone graphs. All the graphs produced by ODS Graphics are sent to ODS
destinations, and they use ODS styles. I think there are a lot of people who have shied away from SAS/GRAPH in the past who will love ODS Graphics.
- Lora Delwiche (LD): ODS graphics is new with SAS 9.2, and I know I am looking forward to getting it at work because with just a few lines of code you can create some really nice graphs. We
also added more functions to the book. For example, we added several members of the "ANY" family of functions that search for particular types of characters, such as white space, numerals, and alphabetic
characters. Other new topics include the compute block in PROC REPORT, and using user-defined formats to group data in procedures.
(AL): How has The Little SAS Book evolved over the years?
- (SS): The thing that strikes me the most when I look at the various editions of The Little SAS Book is how true it has stayed to our original vision with the two-page layout and
avoidance of jargon. It's bigger now, but I think that's more because we have fleshed it out than that we have changed it.
- (LD): Of course as SAS has evolved, so has the book. The first edition was written with SAS 6 when we were still limited to eight character variable names and the Output
Delivery System (ODS) didn't exist. Obviously we have had to update our book to account for these types of major changes, but we have also tried to add the smaller changes to SAS that are
nonetheless important to our readers.
(AL): Will SAS users be able to connect with you at any conferences this fall?
- (LD): Susan and I will both be attending the Western Users of SAS Software conference this year in Universal City. We will be presenting two hands-on workshops there, one of which will be
on PROC SGPLOT, which is one of the new topics for the fourth edition of our book.
- (SS): We go to WUSS every year. It's a very friendly conference, and I always learn a lot. This year I'm also looking forward to going, for the first time, to the Pacific Northwest SAS Users Group
conference in Seattle. There are a lot of high-level SAS users there, so I'm expecting a really great conference.
(AL): What do you enjoy reading, when you're not working on your own books?
- (LD): It's funny that you ask that question because one of the things I really miss when I am writing books, is reading books. I find that, for me, the two activities are just not
compatible. I get way too wrapped up in books that I am reading and tend not to do a lot of other things I really should be doing. So I'm looking forward to reading again. My choices in books run
from Harry Potter, to mysteries, to modern literature. While on vacation recently, I read a delightful book by John Grogan titled Marley and Me, which is purportedly about the "world's worst dog."
I don't know if Marley is deserving of the title, but his antics certainly make for entertaining reading.
- (SS): I love fiction, but recently it seems to be getting harder and harder to find good novels-maybe I'm getting pickier-so I've been reading a lot of non-fiction. I just finished
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham. It's a somewhat rambling book about programming languages and innovation. He has a lot of interesting things to say. For example,
"Innovation and heresy are practically the same thing. Good hackers develop a habit of questioning everything." That's good advice for non-programmers, too. He talks about the attributes of great
programming languages, and speculates about what programming languages will be like 100 years from now. He doesn't mention SAS because he's really talking about third generation languages and SAS
is a fourth generation language. But I was pleased to see that SAS embodies many of the attributes he lists for a great programming language.
|
