Book excerpt: Get up and running with SAS using Ron Cody’s easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide. Aimed at beginners, Getting Started with SAS Programming: Using SAS Studio in the Cloud uses short examples to teach SAS programming from the basics to more advanced topics in the point-and-click interactive environment of SAS Studio. To begin, you will learn how to register for SAS OnDemand for Academics, an online delivery platform for teaching and learning statistical analysis that provides free access to SAS software via the cloud. The first part of the book shows you how to use SAS Studio built-in tasks to produce a report, summarize data, and create charts and graphs. It also describes how you can perform basic statistical tests using the interactive point-and-click environment. The second part of the book uses easy-to-follow examples to show you how to write your own SAS programs and how to use SAS procedures to perform a variety of tasks. This part of the book also explains how to read data from a variety of sources: text files, Excel workbooks, and CSV files. In order to get familiar with the SAS Studio environment, this book also shows you how to access dozens of interesting data sets that are included with the SAS OnDemand for Academics platform.