Dear all,

Recently SAS Chinese community is planing to write a book(in Chinese) collectively on SAS programming. The book is not just for SAS casual users, but for SAS programmers, or, for growing up SAS programmers. The potential audiences(and vision):

---SAS beginners to want to learn SAS for programming step by step --advanced beginners to break their bottleneck to enhance programming skills and get the general programming sense --for SAS experts, hope they find this book fun --for other-language- programmers, they could pick up this book to grab SAS quickly.

The draft topics are listed as follows. Thank you for any comments:

------programming SAS----------- 1. SAS overview --SAS as a language --SAS as a software system --SAS as a company

--First SAS program "hello world" and SAS windows navigation: --menu bar, tools bar, options --SAS windows: Enhanced Editor, Log, output, result, library --SAS dataset and data _null_

--how to learn SAS and where to get help (SAS Doc, SAS-L, mysas.net, blogs, Google)

2. SAS essentials --values and types--char and num --variables --operators --expressions --statements: assign statement, logical statement, sum statement, ... --data steps --procs --options：data step options and global options

3. Function (1): build-in functions and call routings） --function mechanism -- functions and call routings navigation --math/stat, string, time/date functions

4. input and output(I/O)（1） --informat and format --infile and file --input and put --import and export --output statement -- SAS File I/O functions

5. input and output(I/O)（2）：ODS

6. DATA steps processing） --build-in loop --PDV

--set options: point, end(eof) --set/merge

--by group processing: first.var/last.var

7. Control statement (1)：conditional select --if/else --select

8. Control statement (2)：do loop --iterative DO statement --do until --do while --the DOW-loop

9. Control statement (3): jump (CAUTION!) --goto --break --continue --leave --stop --exist

10. Array

11. IML *IML is a huge topic. This session emphasizes basic matrix operations required for user-defined functions in next session

12. Macro essentials

13. Functions (2)：user defined functions *PROC FCMP *IML *function-like macro

14. Basic SQL *may not be inclued

Regards and Thanks, --------- Jiangtang HU jiangtanghu@gmail.com +86 138-1171-7765 http://www.jiangtanghu.com/