Recruiter... Friend or Foe?

Interview with Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche

Alex: The book has a fairly unique structure. The first part (about 40%) is made up of tutorials and the second part is an Enterprise Guide reference. Could you tell us more about the contents of each part and how you decided to write a tutorial/reference book?

Susan and Lora: Because SAS Enterprise Guide is point-and-click, it lends itself very nicely to a tutorial approach for learning. We feel that tutorials are the best way to learn the basics quickly and to get a general feel for how SAS Enterprise Guide works. But at the same time, we have found from experience, that once you complete tutorials and start using software with your own data, a reference style book is more useful for looking up information on particular topics. That’s why we included a tutorial section and a reference section in the book. Every topic covered in the tutorial section is also presented in the reference section, but the reference section covers more topics.

Alex: What topics did you include in the tutorials?

Susan and Lora: There are five tutorials: Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide, Reading Data from Files, Creating Reports, Working with Data in the Query Builder, and Joining Two Data Files Together. Each tutorial has complete step-by-step instructions along with descriptive text and screen shots. All instructions are also included in margin notes so readers can easily find them without having to search through the text. In addition, for those who want even more, we have included side bars containing detailed information where appropriate. We like to think that the tutorials weave together parallel paths of information for the reader.

Alex: By the way, all of the tasks in the tutorials deal only with the point-and-click interface of Enterprise Guide, I don't believe there are any references to SAS code. Was this done intentionally to make the tasks suitable for a wider audience?

Susan and Lora: That's what is so nice about SAS Enterprise Guide -- you don't have to write any code to get results. Of course, if you have some specialized analyses that you need to run, you can still write SAS code in SAS Enterprise Guide if you want. But, there is an awful lot that you can accomplish in SAS Enterprise Guide without even thinking about SAS code. So, yes, we believe this book and SAS Enterprise Guide itself is suitable for a wide audience.

Alex: The reference section is clearly more technical than the tutorial section. Do you think readers with Enterprise Guide or SAS experience will go straight to the reference section?

Susan and Lora: We think readers with SAS programming experience will benefit from the tutorials so they can quickly learn how SAS Enterprise Guide works. Readers with some experience with SAS Enterprise Guide 3.0 could probably also learn from the tutorials, but probably would do just fine going straight to the reference section. Those readers with experience with older versions of SAS Enterprise Guide would probably also benefit by going through the tutorials since many aspects of the interface have changed with the 3.0 release.

Alex: In general, do you expect readers with and without SAS programming skills to approach this book differently?

Susan and Lora: We don't think readers with SAS programming experience will necessarily approach learning SAS Enterprise Guide any differently than if they did not have that experience. However, we do acknowledge that SAS programmers will have a different perspective than non-SAS programmers. We have tried to address this throughout the book. For example, a SAS programmer may want to know how to use the Tabulate procedure in SAS Enterprise Guide. Well, if they look up Tabulate in the index, they will see that the Tabulate procedure equates to the Summary Tables task, and they will be directed to the appropriate pages in the book.

Alex: I also have a more technical question, the book does not discuss stored processes or Enterprise Guide add-ins (custom tasks). Are you planning to cover these topics in the next edition of the book?

Susan and Lora: Whenever you write a book like this you have to make decisions about what topics to keep and what topics to cut. We simply can't cover every possible topic and still be able to call the book "little." But reader input is very important to us. We added several topics to "The Little SAS Book" based on reader comments. So, if stored processes or Enterprise Guide add-ins are topics that people would like to see in our book, we will certainly consider that.

Alex: Enterprise Guide 4.1 is scheduled to be released around the time your book will be published. Have you had a chance to test drive the new version of Enterprise Guide? Were you considering including any information about Enterprise Guide 4.1 in the book?

Susan and Lora: We have seen enough of 4.1 to know that there are some significant changes. The Query Builder, for example, has substantially different tabs and options. It would be confusing to combine information about Enterprise Guide 3.0 and 4.1 in a single book, so, as soon as we are finished with this edition, we plan to start working on a 4.1 edition of the book with the aim of making it available as soon as possible.

Alex: Speaking of Enterprise Guide 4.1, are you planning to update the book for each new release of this software package? The second and third editions of The Little SAS Book were not necessarily tied to new releases of the SAS System.

Susan and Lora: As the SAS programming language has evolved, new features have been added, but for the most part, all the old features still work in new releases of the software. This means that almost everything that is in the first edition of The Little SAS Book, which was written in 1995, still works. The same cannot be said for SAS Enterprise Guide. Although the general concepts have not changed much since the first version of the software, the actual methods for accomplishing things has. This means that we will probably need to update the book for each release of the software.

Alex: And the last question: The book looks and feels a lot like The Little SAS Book but, to my surprise, I did not find quotes at the beginning of each chapter? Are you planning to add them later?

Susan and Lora: We are glad you like the quotes in The Little SAS Book -- we like them too. Unfortunately, we just didn't have time to add quotes to this book. Believe it or not, it takes a long time to collect meaningful quotes. We would love to add quotes to this book, so if any of your readers have suggestions for quotes, we'd love to hear about them.