Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: I loved this book as this helped me to learn all the fundamentals.
Great book with clear examples.
Rating: 
Summary: For absolute beginners
Review: I own almost every introductory book on SAS in print, and this one is used the least. The most use it gets is when someone who has absolutely no experience with SAS comes to me for help - then I can loan this book. It is very easy to read and assumes no knowledge of SAS. It has a few tips that are hard to find in other books at this level, but otherwise falls short. What you will find here is a tutorial on the basics of the SAS/Base package, how to read in data, and a few basic procedures. It covers this material well, but it is not enough unless you are taking a course and have another resource such as lecture notes to do anything really useful. It does not really cover SAS/Stat. I have used the book as the text in a course I taught, as supplementary to my lecture notes. If I taught the same course again, I would choose a different book, such as Cody. The Little SAS Book is a nice book to get started, but will not be the only book you need.
Rating:
Summary: I love this book so much that I would ...
Review: I see that *The Little SAS Book* is now in its 3rd edition. My experiences were with the 2nd edition. I used that version of the book a few years ago when I was doing intensive work with SAS. This book was a life saver. I agree with the positive reviewers and disagree with the negative ones. Yes this book covers the basics - but that is EXACTLY why the book was written! Take it from me, even though I used SAS for sophisticated data analysis (mostly financial econometrics) and regularly used more advanced features of SAS and higher level books and manuals, I still OFTEN referred to *The Little SAS Book* during my SAS programming days. With all due respect to its competitors (Cody's books, etc.), I found *The Little SAS Book* to be the most useful and the most often used. I regularly recommended this book to those who were new to SAS and they always appreciated my recommendation. I can go on gushing about how great this book is, but to sum up in an efficient manner how much I love this book, let me leave you with the following: If either Lora or Susan (the authors of the book) were ever looking for a husband, I would marry either of them in a heartbeat!
Rating: 
Summary: compact and useful
Review: I started learning SAS with this book some time ago and I found it very clear and helpful. The book is organized with short (2-3 pages long) topics about each command (like freq, print,...) or each operation you want to do with SAS (like merging, updating, ...). Every topic starts with an introduction, a syntax and an example. I specially found the examples very helpful.
The book also covers a chapter about macros, that are powerful programming tool in SAS. It gives a simple and to-the-point description of macro tools.
I think a really nice thing about this book is that topics and explanantions are brief yet complete. The book avoids getting into pages of description about one thing. This makes the book a useful reference, even after you have learned SAS.
However, the book is not a complete guide to SAS and misses some advanced discussions and topics (the book actually doesn't claim it is a complete guide in its introduction so I am not blaming them).
In general I recommend this book to both beginners and more experienced users, and it works great along with SAS online tutorial and help.
Rating: 
Summary: Do NOT buy this book!!
Review: I think anyone who wants to get into SAS programming should own this book! I've been programming for about 2 years now and still refer back to this book on occasion. The amount of knowledge packed into this little book (thus the title "The Little SAS Book") is invaluable, especially for a beginner. This was the book that allowed me to pin down some of the mvp's (Most valuable procs) of the language.
Rating:
Summary: 10 solid chapters
Review: I work as a data analyst and have to use SAS on a regular basis. My skills in SAS were acquired by reading tons of manuals and working through thousands of lines of source code. I recently had the pleasure of reading this book and instantly recognized what I had missed to make my life a little easier. This book definitely teaches you about SAS. And don't be fooled by the name either. some of the concepts such as ODS and Macros aren't covered by many base sas books. What's more wonderful is that the reader never feels burdened. I certainly didn't and highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect for tackling the SAS monster
Review: SAS seems so hudge that you really don't know where to start. I am definitively an newcomer to SAS and this was really what I expected. It is build very logically and anticipates all my questions (how do I use the interface, how do I load data, how do I work with them, etc). I gives just enough info for you to be able to dig and understand the help files if needed.
Rating:
Summary: Necessary evil?
Review: This book came packaged with the copy of SAS that we got at work. I used it as my introduction to SAS. The first thing I noticed about the book was that the authors whose photo appears on the back of the book had a somewhat sad look about them. I didn't have to use SAS for long before I found out why. This software tool appears to have been assembled by someone who has no concept of programming practices used by the rest of the world, and likewise no idea of what a GUI should look like. The interface is very painful to work with, even after much practice, and the language is an abomination. I feel like I am getting brain damage every time I use the system, because it forces one to abandon reasonable principlies of coding. That said, if for some reason you have to use SAS, then this book is a very helpful guide for getting started. It explains the principles (ugh) of SAS programming, and has many examples that will help you get up to speed on much of what you might need to accomplish. For a follow-up guide, I suggest the documentation for Matlab, which you will probably be wanting to switch to as soon as possible....
Rating:
Summary: Not enough beef
Review: This book helped me get started writing simple SAS programs, but I was soon in need of a more extensive language reference book in order to accomplish anything slightly different than the samples included in the book. The book's value would have been greatly enhanced by the inclusion of appendicies of SAS functions, etc. I was also left wondering what SAS offers beyond the basic level. A list of advanced features with some brief explanation of utility would have been helpful.
Rating:
Summary: Great Intro to SAS
Review: This book is a primer - it's own title indicates it as such. A primer is what you give to people to get them familiar with something beforehand. SAS is very powerful but it is not intuitive to use - a la Excel. If you haven't used SAS before, reading over this book is a great way to get familiar with it and a nice reference to have for someone new to SAS programming. I learned how to use SAS from this book and the book covering empirical financial research. The disappointed people here are expecting a bit much from something called a 'primer' or simply don't find SAS easy to use. Neither of these shortcomings are the fault of this work. If you've never used SAS or are very new to it, this book is quite good - and that's what a Primer is for.
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