Syllabus
ST 445 -- Summer 2013
Introduction to Statistical Computing and Data Management

Monday-Friday  8:00-9:30 in SAS 1107

This course will cover the mechanics of converting data from whatever form it may arrive and preparing it for processing by statistical software.  The primary goal of this course will be the mastery of Base SAS programming, especially the DATA step.  This class will regularly meet in SICL, and the computing facilities will permit regular hands-on activities.  

The primary material for the course are the code files of demonstrations available at the course website and archived by week.  

Some suggested reference books are:

SAS Institute, SAS Certification Prep Guide (2nd ed), 2009

Frank C. DiIorio, SAS Applications Programming, Duxbury Press, 1991.

SAS Institute, Step-By-Step Programming with Base SAS Software, 2001.

Jay A. Jaffe, Mastering the SAS System, Thompson, 1996.

Lora Delwiche & Susan Slaughter, The Little SAS Book, SAS Institute 
(The third edition of this book is available online at    
  http://www2.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/record/NCSU1858431 )
 
The prerequisite for this course is ST 305, but any introductory Statistics course will suffice.  Further training in Statistics will help in providing a perspective on why we may want to prepare the data in a particular fashion.

Homework and class assignments will be assigned from time to time and will count for about one half of the final grade.  There will likely be 2 quizzes during the semester, each counting for about 15% of the final grade.  The quizzes will be in-class and closed book.  The final will likely count about 20% of the final grade.

Auditors must earn a respectable D to gain recording of this course.

Course Website http://www.stat.ncsu.edu/people/monahan/courses/st445
John Monahan, 5224 SAS Hall, (515-) 1917 monahan@ncsu.edu 


Typical Semester Schedule -- 5 weeks in Summer

  Week  Topics
    1    Basics: data step and procs, SAS dataset
    2    Reading data: list, column, format; reading from files
   3-4   data step language elements & structure, PDV, basic procs
   5-6   loops, SAS functions, Quiz
   7-8   multiple records to one obs, one record to multiple obs, arrays
    9    reading spreadsheet files
  10-11  set, append, sorting, Quiz
  12-13  formats, permanent SAS datasets
   14    merging datasets
   15    using datasets from proc's