SAS is not difficult to learn, but it is a lot to learn. There are so many different SAS products, procedures, and options that it’s difficult to know where to start, and it’s easy to invest a lot of time in learning before you reach the point of being able to use SAS effectively to do really useful work.

The purpose of this book is to provide “just enough” instruction on a broad variety of topics so that a new SAS user can become productive very quickly. Because the coverage is very broad, it is necessarily not as deep as the coverage in other sources. So there are many references to books and papers that you can use to better understand the topics introduced here, and most of the papers are included for download as PDF documents.

Much of the material in the book is general enough to be useful in many fields, but the examples are geared toward the analysis of quality and reliability data, and Chapters 9 and 10 are specifically aimed at those topics.