Thank you to Chris and everyone else who has spoken up to discourage illegal downloading of The Little SAS Book!
Lora Delwiche and I have devoted a lot of time to writing SAS books. Even though our books are published by SAS Press, we are not employees of SAS Institute. In fact, we are not paid a cent while writing our books; we only get paid afterwards when people buy our books. So if people download illegal copies of our books, we don't get paid at all. It takes us 2-3 years to write a book (6 years if you consider that we are both working on it). That is a lot of time to work without getting paid so we really appreciate those royalties! Our books generally sell at a steep discount. I typically make about $1 per book. We have been lucky. Our books have done better than most, but considering the amount of time we have spent, our income has been modest. If people didn't buy our books, we would never have written 11 of them. If people stop buying books, then new editions will stop too. Illegal downloading stifles creators of all kinds (authors, artists, musicians, singers, game designers).
If you can't afford to buy a new copy of The Little SAS Book, why not buy a used copy? That way you won't encourage illegal downloading. You can also try borrowing a copy from a library, especially university libraries. If your library doesn't have a copy, why not ask them to buy one?
Also, I second the recommendation made by a previous poster that you take advantage of the free e-learning courses offered by SAS Institute including SAS Programming 1. And SAS Institute has a huge library of shorter videos on specific topics which are free and excellent.
There are a lot of ways to learn SAS programming without resorting to illegal downloads.
May all your data be clean and all your programs run the first time,
Susan
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