Book excerpt: Aimed at beginners who have downloaded the free SAS University Edition and want to either use the point-and-click interactive environment of SAS Studio, or who want to write their own SAS programs, or both, this book begins by showing you how to obtain the SAS University Edition, and how you can run SAS on a PC or Macintosh computer. Topics include: performing basic tasks, such as producing a report, summarizing data, producing charts and graphs, and using the SAS Studio built-in tasks; performing basic statistical tests using the interactive point-and-click environment; how to write your own SAS programs, and how to use SAS procedures to perform a variety of tasks; 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 product. --