About the Author

 David Pope

David Pope has worked for SAS for over 26 years in a variety of departments, including research and development (R&D), information technology (IT), SAS Solutions on Demand (SSOD), and sales and marketing.  He graduated from North Carolina State University with a bachelor's of science in industrial engineering and a certificate in computer programming. He started his career with SAS, testing and writing code for the SAS system in R&D using C, Java, and of course SAS programming languages.

David has worked in both the United States and Europe in this capacity.  Then he moved into IT within SAS to help support running it as a business, using SAS and other technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and Unix/Linux scripting languages. He spent 4 years working as a consultant with SAS customers in SSOD prior to moving into presales support, where he worked across all industries as an analytics and SAS architecture expert. David moved into presales management to build out a team of data scientists and technical architects who support opportunities in the US energy industry, electric utilities, and oil and gas companies. He currently holds 10 patents for SAS and is an active blogger under the SASVoices corporate blog. He is a life-long learner who enjoys teaching and empowering people to solve business problems.

I would like to recognize all the developers who have worked on SAS, without whom this book would not have been possible to write. There are too many inpiduals to list here whom I have learned from over the course of my career, and they have in one way or another way influenced what is in this book. However, I'd like to recognize Brian Jones for his specific help in using his graphic art skills to greatly improve the visual presentations of several of my ideas that are included in this book.