SAS®9 is a core suite of data extraction, manipulation, analysis and reporting tools which we use in this book. These are a powerful, highly efficient, data analysis solutions used the world over. SAS 9 mostly uses a programming interface, which I discuss below. In this book I specifically use SAS 9.4, but the content also applies to earlier versions like SAS 9.3.

SAS® Studio contains many similar functions to SAS 9 – although not all – and uses your web browser as the interface. As a result, it also runs on Apple Macintosh computers, unlike SAS9, which cannot. In many ways, SAS Studio is a more user-friendly interface than SAS 9 – it uses the same programming language, but with enhanced features, as we will see later in this chapter. Finally, SAS Studio is absolutely free for non-commercial purposes as part of the SAS University Edition package, which you can download off the www.sas.com website. This book is also written for SAS® Studio users – at the time of writing, SAS Studio 3.4 is the latest.

SAS® Enterprise Guide®: This add-on product is also a different interface for running SAS programs, and offers a point-and-click interface for many of the SAS modules.

SAS® Enterprise Miner™: This add-on product specializes in data mining.

SAS® Visual Analytics is a specialist graphics product.

JMP® is a stand-alone, point-and-click statistical package with great business applications.

Others: There are a great number of other SAS products.