SAS Programming and Data Visualization Techniques: A Power User's Guide

SAS Programming and Data Visualization Techniques: A Power User’s Guide brings together a wealth of ideas about strategic and tactical solutions to everyday situations experienced when transferring, extracting, processing, analyzing, and reporting the valuable data you have at your fingertips. Best, you can achieve most of the solutions using the SAS components you already license, meaning that this book’s insights can keep you from throwing money at problems needlessly.

Author Philip R. Holland advises a broad range of clients throughout Europe and the United States as an independent consultant and founder of Holland Numerics Ltd, a SAS technical consultancy. In this book he explains techniques—through code samples and example—that will enable you to increase your knowledge of all aspects of SAS programming, improve your coding productivity, and interface SAS with other programs.

He also provides an expert’s overview of Graph Templates, which was recently moved into Base SAS. You will learn to create attractive, standardized, reusable, and platform-independent graphs—both statistical and non-statistical—to help you and your business users explore, visualize, and capitalize on your company’s data. In addition, you will find many examples and cases pertaining to healthcare, finance, retail, and other industries.

Among other things, SAS Programming and Data Visualization Techniques will show you how to:

• Write efficient and reusable SAS code
• Combine look-up data sets with larger data sets effectively
• Run R and Perl from SAS
• Run SAS programs from SAS Studio and Enterprise Guide
• Output data into insightful, valuable charts and graphs

SAS Programming and Data Visualization Techniques prepares you to make better use of your existing SAS components by learning to use the newest features, improve your coding efficiency, help you develop applications that are easier to maintain, and make data analysis easier. In other words, it will save you time, money, and effort—and make you a more valuable member of the development team.

What you’ll learn

• How to write more efficient SAS code—either code that runs quicker, code that is easier to maintain, or both
• How to do more with the SAS components you already license
• How to take advantage of the newest features in SAS
• How to interface external applications with SAS software
• How to create graphs using SAS ODS Graphics

Who this book is for

SAS programmers wanting to improve their existing programming skills, and programming managers wanting to make better use of the SAS software they already license.

About the Author

Philip R. Holland has over 25 years of experience of working with SAS software. Having started in 1981 as an MVS Systems Programmer for the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), he moved on to Prudential Assurance where, as an MVS Systems Programmer and Performance Analyst, he was the company's SAS technical support representative. His third and final permanent SAS position as a Capacity Planner to Centrefile ended in 1992, when he formed his own consultancy company, Holland Numerics Ltd. Since then, he has provided SAS technical consultancy on all the major platforms that support SAS software in the financial, retail and pharmaceutical sectors in the UK, Belgium, Holland, and Germany.

Holland, the author of thirty articles and conference papers relating to SAS, is an enthusiastic software developer, not only using SAS, but also Perl, Java, JavaScript and Visual Basic. The author of three books, his latest project has been to develop SAS-related eBook apps.