Is statistical knowledge necessary for a SAS programmer?
SAS is a proprietary language that encompasses statistical capabilities, application design, database warehouse functionality. Depending on your intended application of SAS you needn’t have any statistical knowledge whatsoever. With minimal knowledge of basic programming logic one can perform basic data manipulations. As a biologist SAS would likely be used for maintaining experimental data (database functionality) and hypothesis testing (statistical functionality). Many of the statistical calculations are available as pre-programmed procedures or functions (very similar to Excel). So, you needn’t know the mechanics of the calculations just the correct SAS vernacular. Yet, a loose understanding of statistical methods and terminology is necessary to ensure you’re using the correct functions. If you want a basic understanding of SAS I would suggest reading The Little SAS Book ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS
