Book excerpt: Intended for use as a core text or to supplement any introductory or intermediate level statistics course, this book presents the basics of the SAS system in a well-paced, structured, non-threatening manner. It provides an introduction to the SAS system for data management, analysis, and reporting using the subset of the language ideally suited for beginning students, while at the same time serving as a useful reference for intermediate or advanced users. Students learn the language's power and flexibility with many real-world examples drawn from the author's industry experience. Beginning with an overview of the system, this text shows students how to read data, perform simple analyses, and produce simple reports. More complex topics are carefully introduced, guiding students to manage multiple datasets and write custom reports. More advanced statistical techniques such as correlation, regression, and analysis of variance are presented in later chapters.