Where are we learning from?

[ichabod801]

I see this all the time. Before I got promoted into my soul-crushing supervisory position, I was technically employed as a statistician. These days, you can't do statistics without computers. And really, you can't do statistics well without programming. And yet most of the statisticians I know are horrible programmers. There just isn't a culture of programming in statistics. The only reason any programming was taught in my statistics program was that we had Frank Harrell there, who is huge in the R community. But outside of academia, SAS is the dominant language, and it's not a typical language. And people are horrible at programming it.

Part of the problem is the books. I know a dozen programming languages, like many programmers out there. It gets to the point where when you want to learn a new language you just go buy an O'Reilly book (or something similar) and work through the book over a few days. But there's basically no books like Lutz's Learning Python for SAS. It's pretty much all books of examples, with no coherent introduction to the language, much less programming. I've only found one decent books for SAS (Professional SAS Programming Secrets, by Rick Aster).