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Applied Statistics and the SAS Programming Language
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Author: Ronald P. Cody, Jeffrey K. Smith
List Price: $41.33
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0137436424
Publisher: Prentice Hall (15 January, 1997)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 8,536
Average Customer Rating: 4.21 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 1 out of 5
A once great book whose time has passed
Once upon a time, I could not recommend this book highly enough. That's the problem--"once upon a time". In 2004, this book violates what I consider an overriding consideration for instruction books: Never distract the new user with picky details that s/he'll will rarely need in practice.The first few chapters are written using INPUT and DATALINES; commands to enter data. For those unfamiliar with SAS, that means the authors enter all of their data as lines of text typed inside their command language. No one works that way any more! It's a hold over from the days of punchcards. Does the new user really need to know that
INPUT ID 1-3 AGE 4-5 GENDER $6;
means "look in columns 1-3 for a numerical id, columns 4-5 for numerical age, and column 6 for a character designating gender"? When the 4-th edition was written, the answer might have been yes, but even then it would have been given grudgingly. For more than a few years, data almost always arrive as data sets that have already been made into SAS files or as spreadsheets that can be imported directly into SAS. This method of data input would not be a fatal flaw if the material were in a later chapter or an appendix, but it's woven throughout the text starting with the first example on page 3. I would love to see this book updated with a more modern view to how data are processed and analyzed, but I can no longer recommend it in its current form.
Rating: 5 out of 5
A must-have for beginners
Two years ago, I did not know anything about SAS and was intimidated by the SAS Users' Guide. This book beat several others and became my key reference book. The book is simple, elegant and entertaining. I have recommended it to several of my colleagues.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Wonderful book for practitioners
I have a PhD in Marketing and MSEE, and because of this, a good, basic knowledge of statistics. Nevertheless, when i started working in quantitative marketing research, i was often posed with practical problems where i didn't have an immediate answer. THis book was often a lifesaver for me. When i ran into a practical problem analyzing data, i could look something up at the right page, and it would give me the basic intuition and workable prescriptions for a wide range of non-trivial, intermediate problems. My impression is that the people giving this book low ratings are looking for statistical theory, which of course this book isn't about. That's like blaming a pick-up truck for not being as sexy as a roadster. If you live in the real world however and don't have days to figure out the theoretical fine points and accompanying SAS codes, but still want to do solid work and get the basic intuition of what you're doing, this book is worth its weight in gold. I used this in market research, but I'm sure this would be valuable in all social sciences, and probably also in other applied fields such as medical statistics, biology, etc.
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