About the Author

Ron Cody, EdD, a retired professor from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School now works as a private consultant and a national instructor for SAS Institute Inc. A SAS user since 1977, Ron's extensive knowledge and innovative style have made him a popular presenter at local, regional, and national SAS conferences. He has authored or co-authored numerous books, such as Learning SAS by Example: A Programmer's Guide; SAS Statistics by Example, Applied Statistics and the SAS Programming Language, Fifth Edition; The SAS Workbook; The SAS Workbook Solutions; Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS, Second Edition; Longitudinal Data and SAS: A Programmer's Guide; SAS Functions by Example, Second Edition, and Cody's Collection of Popular Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them, and Test Scoring and Analysis Using SAS, as well as countless articles in medical and scientific journals.

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"

"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"