As
I have discussed above, this book does not expect the reader to become
a SAS programmer immediately. All the analyses taught in the book
are given to you as pre-written programming code files that you simply
have to open and run to get the results. As you work with these files,
you will quickly see how the underlying programs work, and soon be
able to apply them to your own datasets and variables with little
change.
Even if you were to
write your own programs from scratch, you would usually save the code
files and then re-open and run them later when you wish to recreate
the analysis.
To open existing programming
code files like those in the “Textbook Materials” folder,
do the following:
-
In SAS 9, go
to File > Open Program and navigate
to where the file is stored on your hard drive.
-
In
SAS Studio, go to the Server
Files and Folders section, and open the code file by
double clicking on it (for instance, see the many code files in the
“Textbook Materials SAS Studio” folder).
As mentioned in the
chapter introduction, there are three big tasks in SAS, namely, data
manipulation, data analysis, and report generation. The following
sections discuss these steps further.