Cody's Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them Reviews

"Ron Cody has assembled another collection of little known but very valuable SAS programming tips and tricks in this excellent volume. The examples and explanations presented are clear, concise, and entertaining. Even if you consider yourself to be a seasoned SAS professional you will find insights into new and useful programming methods using statements that are new and not-so-new to the software. In addition to data step methods, it is particularly gratifying to see tips that involve SAS procedures such as PROC MEANS, RANK, and SQL. Topics covered include data summarization and restructuring, as well as programs aimed at combining data sets into more useful forms. This is an excellent book that deserves a place on every SAS professional’s bookcase."

Gerry Hobbs
Associate Professor of Statistics
West Virginia University

"This book knits together programming skills that you may already have into practical solutions for some of the most common data management tasks. Each section poses a real-world data management problem. Then Cody reaches into his SAS bag-of-tricks to pull out the perfect combination of SAS statements, PROCs, Perl expressions, and macro language code to solve the problem efficiently. If you think you are a pretty good SAS programmer, take a look at these solutions to see whether you are really making the most of the SAS you know."

Jeanne Spicer
Population Research Institute/Social Science Research Institute
Penn State University

"How much would it cost to have a world renowned SAS expert come to your office to solve a  technical problem for you? How about to have him solve a number of other problems while he's there? The surprisingly affordable answer is that it would only be the price of Dr. Ron Cody's new book, Cody's Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them.

Dr. Cody has written several excellent books in the past in which he shows the reader a series of programming constructs and describes how to use them. In this book, he aims at today's busy professional—introducing a programming problem and then providing a simple solution for it. At this point, he provides a little explanation as to why it works, and discusses the function and use of some of the coding constructs it employs.

Based on my experience, every book by Ron Cody—including this one—should have a sticker applied to the cover saying, ‘This book will be an excellent investment of your budget and your time."

Andrew T. Kuligowski
Long-time SAS user

"Wow! Noted SAS author, lecturer, and instructor Ron Cody has written the definitive do not reinvent the wheel SAS book! The twelve chapters in Cody’s Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them provide straightforward examples of how to code dozens of programming tasks that are commonly found in real-world situations. Cody provides a clear definition of each task, simple before-and-after snapshots of the data, sleek SAS code that performs the required action, and down-to-earth explanations of how and why the code works. Readers can easily adapt the clear-cut examples for use in their programs. But, more importantly, they can use the methodologies in the examples to develop a better understanding of SAS and then build upon those ideas in their own work. SAS professionals who purchase this clever book are going to be pleased that they don’t have to puzzle over common programming tasks, but can learn from somebody who has been there and done that!"

Michael A. Raithel
Westat