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Quentin
Super User

I'm a big fan of SAS books.  But every time I go to support.sas.com/books , I'm disappointed by the search tools.  Usually I end up going to Amazon, and then have to filter out all the S.A.S. military stuff.

 

One feature I really want is the ability to sarch for books published by SAS by publication date.  So every once in a while, I could scroll through the list of books published in the past year or two, to make sure I haven't missed anything good. 

 

But I don't see a useful search facility on the support.sas.com/books, is there one?  I think the last time I asked about this, the suggestion I received was to download the PDF, and do a text search for the publication year.  Now I noticed that there is no publications PDF, there just a "SAS Training & Book Catalog" pdf, which has just a list of titles at the end, not even author names.  It looks like I can search for "2016" on https://www.sas.com/store/books/cBooks-p1.html, but then neeed to page throuh the output.  And there is no way to filter out documentation or JMP books or the business books.  I'm just looking for SAS programming books.

 

I haven't seen much investment in the /books website over the years, while support.sas.com has of course evolved significantly.   I think it would be worth considering a redesign.

 

 

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2 REPLIES 2
beccagre
SAS Moderator

Hello,

 

I work with the SAS Global Certification team and we actually do not have direct influence over the site you are inquiring about but I was able to contact someone in that group to get a few answers/suggestions for you.

 

From that link support.sas.com/books there is this section that you can find the most popular topics that link directly to those titles in the store.

 

Popular topics.png

 

In addition, where you mention the https://www.sas.com/store/books/cBooks-p1.html?storeCode=SAS_US, you can drill down by category, product & solutions, plus the search option. If you click on the “more” link under Categories, you will find “Programming” as one of the links. 

 

The store link doesn’t have the ability to search in as much detail as you are asking for regarding titles published in a certain timeframe or filtering out “JMP” or “Doc”. The way it works is all for sale titles will come up that pertain to that topic. The goal is to get more search capabilities included in the store in future releases and as we move to the new web sites, like this: http://support.sas.com/en/learn-sas.html.

 

I hope this information is helpful to you.  I shared your post with the team that manages the site. 

Quentin
Super User

Thanks much @beccagre for forwarding this on, and sharing the reply.  Understand that there are various options for browsing currently, but I think in many contexts search is just as important as browse (often more important).  So glad to see that there is goal to improve the search facilities.   

 

Here's a final thought.  Maybe in addition to enhancing the search facilities, the publishing group could expose the publication data itself (XML / JSON / etc). That is, a data file that has data about each publication (title, author, publication date, format, abstract ..... ).  That SAS users could analyze themselves.  I can imagine blog posts about trends in SAS publishing, etc....   Just a thought.. Perhaps a sily one, but maybe not a crazy one, for SAS to share more of its "internal data" publicly, accessible through web APIs or whatever, as a way to demonstate / role model best practices in data sharing.

BASUG is hosting free webinars Next up: Jane Eslinger presenting PROC REPORT and the ODS EXCEL destination on Mar 27 at noon ET. Register now at the Boston Area SAS Users Group event page: https://www.basug.org/events.

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