The bad news is that there is very little specific SPSS Scripting
information available for those who want to learn scripting. There is no "Sax
Scripting for Dummies" to paraphrase the popular book series.
The good news is that Sax
Basic is compatible with Visual Basic and there are hundreds of books on VB, including
many introductory level books. I have purchased and do recommend Microsoft
Excel 2000 Power Programming with VBA written by John Walkenbach and
published by Hungry Minds, Inc. John's Excel Web site The
Spreadsheet Page is probably the best one.
SPSS Training offers this 133 page, spiral bounded book:
Programming Using SPSS Scripts. The cost is $99 US. I have a copy and, although I find
it a bit expensive, I recommend it to persons with little or no VB
experience. A diskette comes with the book. Here are the titles of the Chapters:
Chap1 Opening, running and modifying a script
Chap 2 The interactive debugging facility
Chap 3 The SPSS object model
Chap 4 Using dialog boxes with scripts. Part 1, creating and filling
dialog boxes
Chap 5 Using dialog boxes with scripts/ Part 2, running options defined
in a dialog boxes
Chap 6 SPSS output object model
Chap 7 Manipulating SPSS output with scripts
Chap 8 Autoscripting
Chap 9 Useful scripting features in SPSS
Appendix: Additional scripts
Some online VB and VBA code archives and Tutorials
