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The following books were published in July 2026 in ebook and paperback formats:
All these books are described in detail and can be purchased using the following links:
https://community.altair.com/discussion/66872/three-new-books-on-altair-slc-now-available?utm_source=community-share
Altair SLC 2026 series: Introduction to posts Twenty-four ready-to-post items promoting the three Altair SLC books, eight for each. No topic appears twice. Where a subject is covered by more than one book it has been assigned to the book that treats it most fully, so the three sets could be scheduled in any order without repeating any information. The three books at a glance Book Pages Audience to aim the posts at Book A — Advanced Altair SLC: Comparing Altair SLC with SAS Software 210 Experienced SAS programmers. Technical detail earns the engagement here; lead with the specific. Book B — Altair SLC for Business Users 207 Programmers and analysts doing the daily work. Practical, problem-and-answer posts. Book C — Altair SLC for Companies 142 Managers, architects and procurement. Cost, risk and migration; keep these the shortest.
All three are by Philip R Holland and Pablo Orosco Joerger, 2026 edition, first printing, July 2026. https://hollandnumerics.org.uk/book-table https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/hollandnumerics Each post will include the purchasing links above, but also a link back to this post to explain the target audiences.
Run the analysis once. Publish it five ways.
ODS DOCUMENT captures the output of a procedure. PROC DOCUMENT replays it later to a different destination, in a different style, without running the analysis again.
It is one of the most useful things in the Output Delivery System, and one of the least used. Altair SLC supports it, and Book A works through a complete example.
The same chapter sets out where the ODS implementation in Altair SLC matches SAS software, and where it does not.
Advanced Altair SLC, chapter 2.
Book B: Altair SLC for Business Users
Altair SLC is a runtime, not an interface.
That distinction matters, because there are several ways to reach it: Analytics Workbench, the command line, Visual Studio Code, a remote server, or another application driving it.
Book B lays the routes out plainly, so that a new user knows which one they are actually using, and why the same program can behave differently depending on how it was started.
Altair SLC for Business Users, sections 2.1 to 2.2.
Why are organisations moving to Altair SLC?
Four reasons, and Book C gives the detail behind each. Cost, from a subscription model with a lower upfront commitment. Flexibility, from multi-language support for Python, R and SQL and an open architecture that fits an existing pipeline. A modern approach, with current machine learning and automation. And a comprehensive feature set under a single licence, rather than assembled from separately priced modules.
Written for the people who have to sign it off, not for the people who will use it.
Altair SLC for Companies, sections 3.1 to 3.2.
WEEK 02 A-02 ADVANCED ALTAIR SLC — PART 2: THERE IS NO SESSION, THERE IS A WORKSPACE The first thing that surprises a SAS programmer opening Altair Analytics Workbench: there is no session. There is a workspace. That one difference changes how you set the current working folder, how file types are associated, and how a server is assigned before anything will run. Book A shows the 2024 and 2025 releases side by side, how to identify the installed version on Windows 11 and on Linux, and compares Workbench feature by feature with SAS Enterprise Guide. If you are moving a team across, this is the chapter to read first. Advanced Altair SLC, chapter 3. B-02 ALTAIR SLC FOR BUSINESS USERS — PART 2: WHERE YOUR DEFAULTS COME FROM Two sessions, same program, different results. Almost always the defaults. Altair SLC has two kinds: those built into the product, and those set in the configuration file. Until you know which is which, a session is not reproducible on anybody else's machine. Book B gives the initialisation procedure for Altair SLC 2026 step by step, for Windows and then for Linux, and separates the two kinds of default option properly. Altair SLC for Business Users, section 2.3. C-02 ALTAIR SLC FOR COMPANIES — PART 2: FOUR PRODUCTS, TWO TABLES Altair SLC. Foundation SAS 9.4. SAS Viya. SAS Viya Workbench. Book C compares all four in two tables. The first summarises the pricing model of each product from publicly available information. The second compares capability and scope across primary positioning, deployment model, execution engine and language support. It is deliberately short, because it is written to be put in front of people who will not read the rest of the book Altair SLC for Companies, section 3.3.
PROC R. PROC PYTHON. In the same program as your DATA step.
Data goes in, results come back, and the SAS-language program stays in charge. PROC IML gives a second route to R for anyone who already works that way.
Book A states what each procedure requires, sets up the Python editor in Analytics Workbench, and then gives three complete worked programs, one for each route.
No bridge to configure, no separate environment to keep in step.
Advanced Altair SLC, chapter 6.
Moving a scheduled job to Altair SLC? In batch, sas becomes wps. Most of the rest of the command line you already know.
Two things worth knowing before you start. Batch comes with a full licence — the Personal Edition does not include it. And on Windows the Altair SLC bin folder has to go into the Path environment variable before the command line becomes usable.
Book B gives both the Windows and the Linux configuration, and the practical considerations that apply once jobs run unattended.
Altair SLC for Business Users, chapter 5.
The Personal Edition of Altair SLC is free, and it includes all the programming features. That makes it the cheapest way to evaluate anything.
But the two installation cases behave very differently. A first-time installation on a machine that has never held Altair SLC or WPS is straightforward. Switching back to the Personal Edition on a machine that has run under a managed, on-premises or wpskey licence is considerably harder than the short published procedure suggests.
Book C documents both, including how to test that the switch worked and what to do when it did not.
Altair SLC for Companies, sections 4.1 to 4.3.
Three editors, one language.
The Altair SLC extension turns Visual Studio Code into a full editing and execution environment for SAS-language programs.
Book A installs and configures it, then compares it directly with SAS Studio and with the SAS extension for VSCode, so a team can decide which editor actually fits the way it works rather than the way it is marketed.
Advanced Altair SLC, chapter 7.
Open a program on your laptop, right-click, and run it on the Linux server.
It is the code text that is sent, not the file — and every ODS destination on the remote server is honoured, so the output lands where you expect it.
Altair SLC Link behaves much like Enterprise Guide or SAS Studio connecting to a remote server. Altair SLC Communicate offers a second route. Book B configures both, and then shows the automatic macro variables that tell you, from inside the program, where it is actually running.
Altair SLC for Business Users, chapter 6.
What does an Altair SLC session actually cost?
A personal computer consumes 10 units. A server operating system consumes 10 per logical CPU, with a minimum of 40. Analytics Workbench itself consumes none.
Units are consumed by device, not by process, so the first user to start a session on a shared server takes the units and everyone after that shares them. Close the session and the units come back.
Book C works the arithmetic through with real examples, and shows exactly what a batch job and a Workbench session report when there are no units left.
Altair SLC for Companies, sections 4.4 to 4.5.
A clinical chapter written by people who have done the work.
It follows the data journey end to end: acquisition and cleaning, transformation and integration, statistical analysis, visualisation, report generation. It covers the CDISC tooling that works with Altair SLC, from the Clinical Standards Toolkit to the R Pharmaverse.
Then it gets practical. Download the sample ADaM data, configure Altair SLC to read it, and build a macro that standardises and compares ADaM data sets.
The chapter closes with an exercise and a worked answer, because reading about clinical programming is not the same as doing it.
Advanced Altair SLC, chapter 8.
The data never arrives in the format you wanted.
One chapter in Book B covers what a working programmer really reads and writes: delimited files with PROC IMPORT, PROC EXPORT and ODS CSV; Excel through the XLSX and EXCEL LIBNAME engines and through ODS EXCEL; Microsoft Access; dBase; MySQL and MariaDB; ODBC through both the ODBC and ODBCOLD engines; and OLEdb.
The database connections added in Altair SLC 2026 are listed separately from those already there in 2025, so you can tell at a glance whether an upgrade solves your problem.
Altair SLC for Business Users, chapter 7.
Will your SAS programs run in Altair SLC? You can find out before you spend anything.
Analytics Workbench syntax checks whole folders of programs through Analyse then Program Compatibility, and reports missing procedures, system options, global statements and Data Step options to an Excel file. The free Personal Edition is enough to run that check.
Book C also lists the known false positives, so that DIMn() and LAGn() are not mistaken for blockers when they work perfectly well.
Altair SLC for Companies, section 10.2.1.
The drug regulators asked for data in a SAS-readable format. They did not ask for SAS data sets.
The industry read that as the same thing. It never was: if the internal structure of a file is known, a program can be written to read it.
Book A does exactly that. It opens an OpenDocument spreadsheet with the ZIP access method, splits content.xml one tag to a line, and builds one data set per sheet. It reads SAS data sets written by Version 6.03. And it writes spreadsheets that LibreOffice opens directly.
Old formats are not a dead end. They are a parsing problem.
Advanced Altair SLC, chapter 9.
Workflows in the 2024 Analytics Workbench are not process flows. Nodes exchange files, not a session — and a macro variable set in one node does not exist in the next.
From the 2025 release that changes. Workflows can import SAS Enterprise Guide project files, and they pass macro variables as well as data between nodes, because the session itself is retained.
Book B catalogues the supplied nodes and sets out the differences from Enterprise Guide process flows, so you know what can sensibly be built before you start building it.
Altair SLC for Business Users, sections 8.2 to 8.4.
The programs are usually the easy part. The files are not.
Altair SLC cannot read SAS catalogs or item stores at all. Any styles, tagsets, formats or source entries held in them have to be extracted to text files using SAS software while you still have it — which is a detail that is easy to discover far too late.
Book C supplies the programs that do the extraction, along with what Altair SLC can read directly: SAS data sets from Version 6 onwards, through LIBNAME engines.
Altair SLC for Companies, section 10.2.2.
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