| SAS Web Technologies provide a comprehensive set of tools for creating and deploying Web applications. This book is an attempt to bring together in one volume a set of examples to illustrate the major issues in Web development, using the tools available from SAS as the building blocks. It is intended both as a general introduction to Web programming and a guide to using SAS Web tools. As such, it is aimed at least three different audiences.
The first group includes experienced SAS users who want to get started delivering content on the Web. These are the attendees at SUGI and the regional conferences who fill lecture rooms and workshops for sessions with SAS/IntrNet, SAS Integration Technologies or SAS AppDev Studio in the title. The second, complementary group includes of Web developers who are interested in access to SAS data and who appreciate the ease and simplicity of the solutions SAS has provided.
The third group includes those project managers, students, and others who want to learn about Web development and who are not well served by the current proliferation of specialized texts. Clearly it is not possible to cover this entire topic comprehensively in a reasonably sized volume. On the other hand, introductory users are often baffled by the wide variety of options available and the blizzard of confusing Web terminology.
This book, then, attempts to achieve two goals: first, to organize the options for Web programming into an understandable framework, and second, to show how the available SAS tools fit into this framework. The strength of SAS is its ability to make difficult data analysis and presentation tasks straightforward, if not simple. With SAS Web Technologies, users can leverage their substantive experience without having to learn a whole new specialized set of tools. In addition, the full power of SAS is available for data exploration, analysis, and reporting. |