Professional SAS Programming Secrets can best be seen as an early attempt to document the kind of work we and many others were doing with SAS programming. It was written at a time when there were no SAS programming books, and we took a stand against the enormous amount of misinformation that surrounded the field. If the book seems defensive in tone now, it is well to remember that it comes from an era in which a student in a SAS class might incorrectly be taught that a data step was a SAS dataset, a macro was much like a proc, a data step processed all its input observations simultaneously, and there were several different PUT statements. Now, a decade later, we know better — right?
The book mainly covers features that versions 5 and 6 had in common. So much has changed in SAS that only a long-experienced SAS expert, someone who knows what has changed between versions 5 and 9, should attempt to be guided by Professional SAS Programming Secrets now. Yes, more than two thirds of the techniques are still valid, but if you don't know which ones those are, the techniques that are now out of date could lead you down the wrong path from time to time. For current information about the SAS language and how it works in the SAS environment, read Professional SAS Programming Logic. You can find an up-to-date and greatly expanded set of tips, techniques, and algorithms in Professional SAS Programming Shortcuts.
The two editions are slightly different. The second edition adds information on such things as the REPORT proc, indexed lookup, and international date formats. The update document, originally printed as six pages, and reformatted as a 12-page free download on this site, contains the key information that was added in the second edition.
This book is out of print and hard to find. But don't worry — nearly everything that matters in it is covered in my two newer books, Professional SAS Programming Logic and Professional SAS Programming Shortcuts.