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Hi Rick,
Apologies if my statement were biased. I am commenting on the basis of my
experience in my region which is drastically different from the US. I have
so far came across only 2 companies who are using SAS/IML. Hopefully take up
rate will increase.
Below are my comments which are entirely my personal opinion.
1) There are many thousands SAS/IML sites and programmers.
=>Yes. There are many sites and several programmers who I know use SAS/IML.
=>When I refer not widely used, I meant that probably only 10% or less of
the existing SAS users base use it. I could be wrong on this as I do not
have any statistics on this.
=>Hopefully more people can adopt it because it has great synergy with data
mining especially with implementation of algorithm.
2) SAS Press has for years been wanting someone to author a book on
SAS/IML because customers frequently come to the SAS Press booth and ask
for one.
=>Yes. I have been waiting for it as well. Great to see it out now.
3) My book (Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software) is selling very
well.
=>Not surprising. Being the only book for SAS/IML as well as probably the
only statistical programming book with SAS, it has great appeal among
SAS/IML and algorithm people.
4) My IML blog (http://blogs.sas.com/iml) is one of the top-read SAS blogs
with hundreds of subscribers.
=>Your blog is one of the few blogs that explain extremely interesting
programming concepts as well as solution to problems. A refreshing read for
people who wants to learn more about SAS/IML. I probably read one of the
least read but equally interesting one by Clark.
5) There are more than 230 references to "PROC IML" in the SUGI
proceedings on www.lexjansen.com.
=>I hope that we can have more SAS/IML in the upcoming forum. Would be
interesting to get OR and IML mixed together.
However, I do agree with Murphy's general statement: a general getting
started book does not need to devote very many pages to SAS/IML, since it
is a more advanced topic.
=>I think we should get some basic matrix manipulation steps in here. In
fact, a simple bivariate regression example would be excellent.
--
Regards,
Murphy Choy
Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS V9
Certified Basic Programmer for SAS V9
DataShaping Certified SAS Professional
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