Book Image

Hands-On SAS for Data Analysis

By : Harish Gulati
Book Image

Hands-On SAS for Data Analysis

By: Harish Gulati

Overview of this book

SAS is one of the leading enterprise tools in the world today when it comes to data management and analysis. It enables the fast and easy processing of data and helps you gain valuable business insights for effective decision-making. This book will serve as a comprehensive guide that will prepare you for the SAS certification exam. After a quick overview of the SAS architecture and components, the book will take you through the different approaches to importing and reading data from different sources using SAS. You will then cover SAS Base and 4GL, understanding data management and analysis, along with exploring SAS functions for data manipulation and transformation. Next, you'll discover SQL procedures and get up to speed on creating and validating queries. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn all about data visualization, right from creating bar charts and sample geographic maps through to assigning patterns and formats. In addition to this, the book will focus on macro programming and its advanced aspects. By the end of this book, you will be well versed in SAS programming and have the skills you need to easily handle and manage your data-related problems in SAS.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: SAS Basics
4
Section 2: Merging, Optimizing, and Descriptive Statistics
7
Section 3: Advanced Programming
10
Section 4: SQL in SAS
13
Section 5: Data Visualization and Reporting

What are macros?

In common language, we call the macro facility macros. The macro facility is a means for text substitution. It has two main components:

  • Macro processor: The portion of the facility that does the work
  • Macro language: The syntax that communicates with the processor

Macros are generally used as macro variables or macro definitions. In the former, one or multiple variables can take the value from user inputs, or can be based on the mathematical or logical resolution of some statements. The macro definitions can consist of various tasks that can be called upon by the user.

Remember these don'ts even before you start writing macros, or else you might get caught up in programming rather than delivering your objectives efficiently:
  • Macros can't fully substitute for usual programming. Some of the tasks you do in programming are non-repetitive and could be...