Statistical Programming

This chapter discusses some important aspects of SAS statistical programming in clinical trial research. There are as many sets of necessary programming skills as the number of existing positions in biostatistics multiplied by the number of active biostatisticians. One of the problems in SAS programming is the difference in what programmer can do in the DATA step or in the open code. One important word of advice: there are a lot of tools and options available in SAS to do it at the highest level. SAS was executing the program without any error message for 4 days without any visible results. The nature and the depth of this integration almost dictates the “weakest link” approach to this problem. A biostatistician who has no clear understanding of what statistical programming does is destined to fail.