When I was in 2nd year of my undergrad in Dhaka University, my elder brother got me a gift which he bought for me while coming back after finishing his course works in U.S. The gift was a thin book and the title of the book was sort of funny - "The Little SAS Book: A Primer" written by two ladies Lora D. Delwiche and Susan J. Slaughter. My brother is a non-statistics guy and the text in my university was something else - "Applied Statistics and the SAS Programming Language" by Ronald P. Cody and Jeffrey K. Smith, which is recognized as a good text all over the world. Therefore, I was sort of disappointed in my brother for wasting money (well, I was actually hoping to get some electronic gadget from him).

However, when I started reading the book, I was fascinated by the idea of the organization of the book: it had 10 chapters and each was filled up with small sections, each ending within 2 pages! The writting was so non-technical, I could not resist reading the entire book at a stretch! I guess the book might not be appropriate as a text for professional statisticians, but could be great start for a 2nd year statistics student who might like to explore SAS by him/her-self before any regular course. The book by Ronald P. Cody and Jeffrey K. Smith is a great book, but some students could find it too wordy, but "The Little SAS Book: A Primer" is very concise and easy reading for any audience, statistician or non-statistician.

A sample chapter can be viewed in sas support site and all the codes are available in sas ftp site (please check sas companion sites for more fascinating books and reviews). Good thing, I left the book in ISRT library before I left Bangladesh (and left a master-photocopy to a Nilkhet book-seller so that he can sell it in low price to other students who might be interested). I hope others also get in touch of this particular book and feel the same joy I felt several years ago :)

(The above comentary was written assuming audience knows the value of SAS in the statistics community, along with the bizarre coding system it has :p)

(NOT UPDATED SINCE 2008)

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In the past three or four years of my study in Canada, I have received numerous emails from fellow students back home requesting for journal articles and other academic resources. When I get such requests, I try to act promptly with enthusiasm. Our students are brilliant and catches things very quickly. They can analyze things very critically. However, their condition is like a powerful machine without any fuel. I (and perhaps others living abroad) take my pleasure to provide them with a little bit of support whenever they need.

To me, supporting an underprivileged group is always encouraging. But at times I get perplexed, especially, when you receive a request like the following:

" Sir, how are you? I need the following (book or papers.... Thanks, bye."

I stop for a while as to whether I should respond to such queries at all. Sometime they request for a whole bunch of papers, many of which are available free of cost via Google Scholar. I guess some students do not even read the list; they just copy from the back of a paper and pastes them on a document and sends in. That's it!

So, in order to be able to help students better I am outlining some basic steps that one should follow before requesting for articles/books from me.

If you are looking for journal articles

• Please search it first in Google / Google Books / Google Scholar / A9.com for availability of a possible free copy.
• if you are requesting for articles from several journals, please make the list according to journals and in a chronological order. That i.e, put the oldest first, then the newer... or the other way.
• do not copy-paste from the back of a paper. Even if you do so, please correct for any typographical errors inherent in them.
• try to show your seriousness, i.e., write a few lines about what steps have you taken to obtain a particular reference.
• do not blindly ask for a research topic. This is for you to take up with your supervisor.
• do not send the list in attachments. Please sent plain-text email only.

If you are looking for books

Please note that books are the most expensive academic material in any developed country (US, Canada, UK, Australia and so on). Unlike our parts of the world (Bangladesh, India, etc) llibraries in developed countries do not carry textbooks. Textbooks are those books which are necessary for a course. For example, any third-year level Mmathematical Statistics course would have Introduction to Mathematical Statistics by Hogg, McKean and Craig listed as a textbook. Textbooks are for the students to purchase and they are really expensive (e.g., the above mentioned book is priced between $ 100 to $150 in the US and Canada.

Some books are available online or from other sources which you should try to find from the Internet. Google is the best tool to search for these books. Some forums also have links to such books. Also some file sharing sites (such as www.esnips.com) where PDF versions of some books could be found.

Buy books from local bookstore

Purchasing books in India or Bangladesh is a lot cheaper than here. Some of the classic books have low priced edition for the students in the Indian subcontinent. It is usually a good idea to contact your local book seller and request them to get a copy of the low priced edition for you.

This talk will be updated as often as it is necessary. Thanks for your understanding. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

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Let's talk statistics... is a blogging platform for statisticians promoting statistical learning in an informal way. It contains (or will contain) discussions on statistics and data analysis techniques applied to scientific, industrial or societal problems. Although it is a blogging platform, statisticians here would share their thoughts and ideas from their experiences, engage in discussion on various issues that are prevalent in academic and industrial settings, write informal reviews on published articles or books, provide suggestions or solutions to queries on SAS, R/Splus and other statistical packages.

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Video tutorials on R (parallel to s-plus) specially made for newbies are available via youtube. This starts with the topics like
Vector arithmetics

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Probability distribution is central to anything that you might think about statistics. There are many terms in statistics which are not readily understandable when you hear them for the first time. As the time passes, you would probably pretend to have understood those mysterious words, yet, they might not resonate very well to you. I can reasonably assume that there are people who would not visualize many things on the first attempt. Probability distribution is one of those terms in statistics that you will hear almost all the time, but would probably find somewhat inconvenient to grasp.

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It was one of the several occasions when I thanked myself to be a statistician!
At around 4:30pm my phone started ringing. It was an unknown caller on the other end. I knew, it will be another credit card offer or an offer for a telephone calling card. I was quite right (you don't need to be a statistician to predict such a call). I picked up the phone and the person at the other end began with the typical note:

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