In this book, Robert Rutledge provides "just enough" instruction on a broad variety of topics so that a new SAS user can become productive very quickly. Although most of the material in the book is geared toward a general audience, engineers will especially benefit from the focus on analysis of quality and reliability data found in chapters 9 and 10 as well as in the examples throughout the book.

New SAS users will find Rutledge's book useful as a quick-start guide to doing meaningful work with SAS, and experienced users will find numerous tips and techniques for improving and extending their coding methods.

As a stand-alone document in its own right, here is a free excerpt titled "Analyzing Quality Data with SAS." It illustrates some SAS procedures that can be used in the three phases of statistical quality improvement, with particular emphasis on using PROC SHEWHART and PROC CAPABILITY to support the implementation of statistical process control.

Written by Lora Delwiche and Susan Slaughter, this free paper focuses on topics of special interest to SPSS programmers. The authors discuss differences in terminology, show how to move SPSS data files into SAS, and then give examples illustrating reports and analyses of likely interest to SPSS users.

SAS Press editor-in-chief Julie Platt shared her thoughts on the importance of this valuable resource. "We frequently receive feedback from customers, particularly in the academic market, that they want to move from SPSS to SAS. Having a guide that covers basic tasks and terminology in SPSS and maps them to the equivalent tasks and terminology in SAS will make that transition as easy as possible. It will be easily accessible. It can simply be downloaded from the SAS companion site or from one of the SAS Publishing partners (Amazon, Books24X7, NetLibrary).