If you need to get one book to get you through an introductory statistics course, which uses SAS, grab this. The topics, from importing and doing descriptive statistics out to the inferential statistics that are typically taught in a one quarter stat class are well covered with a nice mixture of text to well annotated code and output. There is also some really nice material on the concepts of hypothesis testing and p-values (and how sample size impacts inference). Beyond that material, it differs from its main competitors, The Little SAS Book: A Primer, Fourth Edition, in that it reads as a textbook instead of the two page summaries of TL SAS Book and it covers getting started with SAS and basic inference in more depth than Common Statistical Methods for Clinical Research with SAS Examples, Second Edition. Both of those books are superior in the breadth of topics covered but this is a solid one book alternative.



There are a couple topics missing from the book. The most important missing parts are how to use SAS to calculate power and sample size (power is not even in the index) and the lack of information on the newish statistical graphics plots (like sgplot).



If those weaknesses do not bother you, this is a good place to get started if you want to learn how to do the most elementary statistics with SAS.