SAS Support Communities

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 ... View more

This is an interesting question.  If you count all the editions (and you should because they are a lot of work!), Lora Delwiche and I have written 11 books.  When you write that many books, it is not surprising that some might turn out better than others.  If you asked me to name the two best editions of The Little SAS Book, I would say they are the 3rd and 5th.  I applaud the contributor of this question for being well informed.    There are two major differences: 1) The 5th edition includes ODS Graphics (in stat PROCs, PROC SGPLOT and PROC SGPANEL).  ODS Graphics did not exist when we wrote the 3rd edition.  2) The default for output has changed.  The 3rd edition shows LISTING output (in other words, text) whereas the 5th edition shows HTML output.  This might sound like a cosmetic difference, but it matters to new SAS users.  For example, if they use the 3rd edition, they could be confused by the fact that there is (by default) no output in the Output window.  The 5th edition tells you how to create text output; the 3rd edition doesn't since it was the default.  And it's always nice if the output shown in a book looks like what you actually get.    There are smaller differences too.  The 5th edition covers linguistic sorting, PROC TTEST, and the AGE argument in the YRDIF function.  None of those is covered in the 3rd edition.      So, I recommend the 3rd edition only for people who are using SAS 9.1 or earlier.  If you are using any flavor of SAS 9.2, then the 5th edition is a much better resource.  At this time, there is no reason to think the 5th edition will become obsolete.  ... View more