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Categorical Data Analysis Using The SAS System Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: nice practical book
Comment: If you want to know how to use SAS to do applied statistical analysis on categorical data, this book is a good one. It shows every step in SAS coding, how to explain results from SAS output. It does not go deep in terms of statistical theories, but it tells right situations to which each method applies. To me, the advantage of this book is that it is arranged clearly, I never lose forest while reading trees.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: pleasant experience
Comment: The book I bought reached me in time and it's in good condition, plus it's useful, so I'm happy with it.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Categorical Data Analysis Using the SAS system
Comment: It's a good handbook provides examples that are easy to replicate; full explanations of code use. Logical Layout. Easy to find your topic of interest.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A good text for analyzing categorial data with SAS, but not an introductory text.
Comment: I have the luxury of taking categorical data analysis with Dr. Koch (one of the author's of this book), and his depth of experience using SAS for categorical data analysis is definitely demonstrated in this book. If you need to know how to analyze categorical data using SAS, this book is a necessity; it includes almost all the code/option statements you'll need to do every flavor of categorical test, including exact tests. The downside is this book is light on theory, and I find myself going back to my general biostats tome for explanations of some topics. This book probably also isn't going to work for you if you need a book on categorical stats using a package other than SAS or if you've never used SAS before. All in all, if you like or need to use SAS for your work, this book paired with your favorite general stats tome is pretty much everything you'll need to completely dissect non-continuous data.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Two ISBNs, One Great Book
Comment: The second edition of this book has two ISBNs: 1-58025-710-0 under SAS Institute and 0-471-22424-3 under John Wiley & Sons. In spite of what Amazon displays, both books have only 426 pages of content+index and are copyrighted in year 2000. The Wiley version just has a few more pages of catalog. Other than that, you pay different prices for exactly the same thing.

As for the usefulness of this book, I think its reputation speaks for itself. While this book orients around code examples, it is not shy of laying out the theoretical groundwork to let readers know why it is doing what it is doing. Chapters 1 through 7 give a solid introduction to PROC FREQ, and thoroughly cover all forms of 2- and 3-way contingency tables. The only shortcoming is its lack of details on concordant statistics such as Sommer's D. (Section 5.4.1 is a bit short.) To fill that gap, I recommend Bayo Lawal's "Categorical Data Analysis with SAS and SPSS Applications". The rest of the book (chapters 8 through 17) mainly drills on major topics such as PROC LOGISTIC, PROC CATMOD, and PROC GENMOD. But it also covers PROC RANK, PROC PHREG, PROC NPAR1WAY, PROC IML, and even ODS. However, the second edition barely made the updates for SAS 8.1, and is currently slightly out-of-sync with the latest release of SAS 9.1 as of 2007.

All in all, this book provides not only quick access to complete SAS codes for use in practical scenarios, but also insightful information on goodness-of-fit, diagnostics, missing data handling, and other important but often overlooked matters. As much ground as this book covers, it only requires minimal SAS programming skills and only some decent knowledge of categorical data analysis on readers' part. Everyone should be able to find something relevant to his purpose (and make use of it) in the variety of examples in this thoughtfully written book.

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