SAS Resources
Alex: Like a lot of people, I have found that the best way to learn some programming is by tackling specific tasks or problems. One place that you can see how others have handled specific tasks or problems and even gotten the advice of some big name programmers is the SAS-L listserv. SAS user groups are another great resource, particularly if you have one nearby (Thank you, PhilaSUG!), or if you are able to attend a regional or even THE worldwide conference (SAS Global Forum). If you are not so lucky, papers from these fora are archived by Lex Jansen. There is also a great wiki site with lots of tips and wonderful contributors called sasCommunity.org.
Here is my full set of SAS bookmarks, but be warned, there are undoubtedly some 404 pages mixed in since it has been a while since I cleaned these up. I need to relocate these since Google has done away with “public lists”. Stay tuned…
R Resources
Alex: The R world seems to pull in a lot of people who already have very strong computer science backgrounds, who are obviously not learning to program for the first time. The resources that they need are going to be different from those who are coming to R from SPSS, SAS, or Stata. For social scientists those in the latter group, there are a few resources with you specifically in mind: Robert Kabacoff has a site called Quick R and book R in Action that are both excellent, Kleinman and Horton have a book (and blog) called SAS and R that demonstrates the same task in each, and Bob Muenchen’s book R for SAS and SPSS Users demonstrates tasks in all 3. While I have benefited from each of these at various times, I find that I use two R books published by O’Reilly Media more often: R in a Nutshell and the R Cookbook.
The R crowd also seems to be heavily into blogging and tweeting (#rstats) and luckily there is a site that has aggregated many of the R-related blogs into one place called R-bloggers. R also has a listserv, many R tagged questions on the Q&A site stackoverflow, and local user groups popping up everywhere, even Philly.
I don’t know if it’s the plain HTML or the bad jokes, but this is hands-down my favorite R site here.
And here are the rest of my R Bookmarks, also with the same caveats about busted links.
SPSS Resources
Alex: I am not as familiar with the SPSS resources out there, but I have found a terrific site that boasts a free 400-page book on SPSS programming and data management: Raynald’s SPSS Tools. There is also an excellent wiki here. Finally, I’m a big fan of this “Internet Guide to SPSS.”
Robin: There are two particular advantages of SPSS that keep us subscribing. One is that many IR offices use it, and so it is the most frequent format for sharing. And the other is that with its custom Tables add on, it allows for the most efficient summaries of common response survey items that I’ve found. An example is a table where you’d like survey items in the rows, their common response options in the columns (e.g. disagree to agree), and frequency counts and row percents in the cells. You might be able to get to that presentation using other packages with a lot of syntax, but we need that functionality too often to create syntax every time.
StatTransfer
Robin: A very nice little package that helps us to move easily between these other packages is StatTransfer. It will translate files between standard software formats, including Access, ASCII, Excel, JMP, SAS, SPSS, dBASE, Stata, and many others (the newest version includes R!). Importantly, it comes with an incredibly reasonable price tag.