Professional SAS Programming Secrets

Professional SAS Programming Secrets brings together the skeptical scientific mindset required in professional computer programming with the specific requirements and possibilities of the SAS programming language.

The First Edition

When it first appeared in 1991, Professional SAS Programming Secrets helped to define the SAS programming field by disproving the various simplistic impressions of the SAS language that were largely competing with each other at the time (mainly in classes — there were no real books covering SAS programming prior to Professional SAS Programming Secrets). The book was built on the simple idea, borrowed from the computer programming field, that a fact about a computer program or programming language was not true unless it could be proved. Professional SAS Programming Secrets, in insisting on a mechanistic view of SAS that could be demonstrated and tested, brought the practices of professional computer programming together with SAS for the first time in public.

Only perhaps a tenth of the techniques presented in the book were new. The vast majority were common knowledge passed around by word of mouth among the programmers who worked around data centers in New York City (and, I assume, elsewhere), but hidden from the public who did not have the privileged access to the data center world. Professional SAS Programming Secrets took the most interesting and useful of these “secret” techniques and put them in front of the public for the first time. It also straightened out many of the specifics of the workings of SAS that were described incorrectly in all other literature at the time, sometimes including the official documentation.

The book mainly covered features that versions 5 and 6 had in common. Most of the techniques still work in version 9, often with some adjustments, but most are not so important now, as SAS has added new features to simplify things for programmers.

The Second Edition

The second edition was only about 5 percent changed. It added information on such things as the REPORT proc, indexed lookup, and international date formats.