Author: Philip Holland

Owner and Administrator of Holland Numerics: Blog and Forums.

SUGUKI SAS user group in the UK & Ireland – April updates

Loading

With so many SUGUKI events in the calendar, it’s worth putting them all in one place!

SUGUKI is an independent SAS User Group, staffed by volunteers – and we are in continuous need of speakers, venues, sponsorship, and general support. Our web site can be found at https://www.meetup.com/SUGUKI. We’d love to hear from you. We also now have a community on SAS Communities!!

Our events are always 6-8pm on a Thursday, with two SAS presentations and drinks. Sign up below!

05APR2018 – London SUGUKI meetup – https://www.meetup.com/SUGUKI/events/dzdfhpyxgbhb/ – I’ll be presenting “Something for Nothing! Converting Plots from SAS/GRAPH to ODS Graphics” and offering a copy of my latest book in a free prize draw for attendees!
19APR2018 – Edinburgh SUGUKI meetup – https://www.meetup.com/SUGUKI/events/247773056/
03MAY2018 – London SUGUKI meetup – https://www.meetup.com/SUGUKI/events/247308610
24MAY2018 – Manchester SUGUKI meetup – https://www.meetup.com/SUGUKI/events/247771538/

For those available during the day (9-3pm) the following Analytical Lifecyle User Groups are also available from SAS Institute (https://www.sas.com/en_gb/customer-loyalty/user-groups.html).

All these events are free, but you must register for security and capacity reasons.

A new SAS user group in the UK & Ireland – SUGUKI

Loading

With so many SUGUKI events in the calendar, it’s worth putting them all in one place!

SUGUKI is an independent SAS User Group, staffed by volunteers – and we are in continuous need of speakers, venues, sponsorship, and general support. We’d love to hear from you.

Our events are always 6-8pm on a Thursday, with two SAS presentations and drinks. Sign up below!

08MAR2018 – London SUGUKI meetup @ The Shard – https://goo.gl/cPG6NU
22MAR2018 – Dublin SUGUKI meetup – https://goo.gl/6hUSij
05APR2018 – London SUGUKI meetup – https://goo.gl/6sBN4K – I’ll be presenting “Something for Nothing! Converting Plots from SAS/GRAPH to ODS Graphics” and offering a copy of my latest book in a free prize draw for attendees!
19APR2018 – Edinburgh SUGUKI meetup – https://goo.gl/21U2dk
24MAY2018 – Manchester SUGUKI meetup – https://goo.gl/HZs6su

For those available during the day (9-3pm) the following Analytical Lifecyle User Groups are also available from SAS Institute (https://goo.gl/PH6Lyc):

13MAR2018 @ Leeds (One Park Lane)

All these events are free, but you must register for security and capacity reasons.

All the PDF course notes for my courses have been moved to Lulu.com

Loading

All the PDF course notes for my courses have been moved to Lulu.com. You can still find links to them on the SAS books page in the Holland Numerics Product Shop, but the links will now send you to my Lulu.com Store, where you can buy the PDF eBooks.

I realise that some blog site visitors do not wish to register on this site, so moving the eBooks to a distributor should make the purchasing a little easier for everyone.

All future PDF course notes will be published directly on Lulu.com.

I’ve added the final topic of the Data Steps course in the SAS course (in the SAS Programming Forum)

Loading

I’ve added the final topic of the Data Steps course in the SAS course (in the SAS Programming Forum), and it describes some of the syntax used in Data Step processing.

I have added, for those who don’t want to follow the course but would prefer to read the course notes, a copy of course notes as a downloadable PDF ebook, and I have now published Android ebook apps with the same content on Google Play and Amazon Appstore.

As other SAS courses are finalised I will be publishing them as PDF ebooks and Android apps too.

I’ve created a SAS course pricing survey

Loading

I’ve created a SAS course pricing survey (just 5 questions, which should take only 3-5 minutes to complete), because I’m interested in pricing my SAS course to attract the maximum number of users, but not make it so cheap that it does not cover the effort required to create it. Please assist me by completing this survey, which will close as soon as there have been 100 responses. I would hope that every blog site member will help me by responding to this poll.

Currently my SAS course is included in the SAS Programming Forum, which costs £5 (approximately $7) per month, where SAS-related questions can be answered. At the moment my SAS course includes groups of topics on:

  • Data Steps
  • Macros
  • PROC SQL

Thanks in advance…………Phil

Apologies to anyone who recently downloaded my SAS Training Course List, but a new one for 2018 is now available!

Loading

Apologies to anyone who recently downloaded my SAS Training Course List, but a new one for 2018 is now available as a free download!

The significant updates in the 2018 list are:

  • The new 1/2-day PROC SQL course is now available.
  • A new 1/4-day Introduction to ODS RTF course is now included, which should be considered as an add-on course, rather than to be booked on its own. Note that a 1/4-day course costs half of a 1/2-day course. However, any travelling and accommodation expenses will be the same, of course.

Finally a quick reminder that course notes for some of the courses can be purchased separately as PDF eBooks or Android apps. See the training page in the Product Shop for all the available course notes and also the latest Training Course List.

Can’t afford the price of the training course? You can now buy the course notes!

Loading

A while back I told you about how my SAS training courses were intended for companies and not for individuals. I can now announce that the course notes from those training courses can now be purchased as PDF eBooks. Some of the courses based on the SAS course can also be downloaded as Android apps. The following course notes can now be purchased here:

I will continue to add more course notes over time.

I’ve added the final topic of the PROC SQL course in the SAS course (in the SAS Programming Forum)

Loading

I’ve added the final topic of the PROC SQL course in the SAS course (in the SAS Programming Forum), and it describes some of the limitations and differences between the SQL language in PROC SQL and the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) guidelines for SQL.

I’ve also added, for those who don’t want to follow the course but would prefer to read the course notes, a copy of course notes as a downloadable PDF ebook, and have published Android ebook apps with the same content on Google Play and Amazon Appstore.

As other SAS courses are finalised I will be publishing them as PDF ebooks and Android apps too.

sasCommunity.org is winding down from January 2018

Loading

I’ve been posting on sasCommunity.org every now and then for nearly 10 years, including hosting VIEWS News and my SAS Author pages there, but a decision has now been made by the sasCommunity Advisory Team to set the site to Read-Only from 01Jan2018. Chris Hemedinger has added a blog post on The SAS Dummy giving a little more information on where the sasCommunity.org content could be relocated.

Note that the VIEWS News issues can now be accessed on this blog site in the VIEWS UK forum, which is a free resource for all registered blog members, but an access request is required after you have registered.

The wiki site was the first to be SAS-related and user-maintained, so that every registered SAS user could add and update their own content. This was long before GitHub appeared, and when LinkedIn and the SAS Communities had barely started.

I think I will leave the last words to the sasCommunity Advisory Team, who posted this announcement on the sasCommunity.org site on 07Dec2017:

sasCommunity.org to be Decommissioned

December 7, 2017
Notice from the sasCommunity Advisory Team

Today, SAS practitioners have unprecedented access to expertise from their fellow SAS users around the world. Using modern community forums and code sharing platforms, SAS users are learning from each other more than ever before.

Although there is a demonstrated increased interest in SAS topics in general, we’ve seen the traffic and contributions on sasCommunity.org remain flat (and even decline) over the past few years. The team has taken the decision to help users to focus on the newer, well-supported platforms — and decommission this wiki-based site.

Before we cover some logistics, we want to recognize the important role that sasCommunity.org – and all of its volunteers and contributors – has served over the past 10 years. The site pioneered peer-to-peer collaboration around SAS during an era when there were fewer alternatives. We are grateful to those who devoted countless hours to building and nurturing the site. Thank you!

Now…on to the future. Our first step will be to put the site into ‘Read Only Mode’ on January 1, 2018. This will allow the relocation of important and popular content responsibly, while eliminating the overhead of accepting new pages. We plan to support, as best we can, the owners of existing content to make sure they can find a new home for content and articles they want to preserve before the final decommissioning (that date is TBD).

Examples of content that we know that probably should be relocated:

  • Author Pages
  • User Groups pages
  • Historical Conference Proceedings
  • sasCommunity.org Planet (blogs aggregator)
  • Several unique and very popular articles

Some of this content may be relocated to the SAS Support Communities (communities.sas.com) with the help of SAS Institute. Historical proceedings might find a home alongside the other proceedings we have for more recent SAS conferences. Code-based projects may be a better fit on GitHub, a site designed specifically for sharing code related to any technology. All ideas are under discussion, and we welcome your input.

Thanks for your valuable support over the years, and we look forward to continued collaboration!

The SAS Programming Forum is growing again with 8 new SAS course topics

Loading

The SAS course and the SAS Programming Forum continue to grow, I have just added 8 new course topics about PROC SQL, and there are now 33 topics in 4 different sections:

  • [A] SAS components – 2 topics
  • Data Steps – 13 topics
  • [F] PROC SQL – 14 topics (8 new topics!)
  • [G] Macros – 4 topics

The SAS course topics themselves are in the SAS Programming Forum, which can only be accessed by Programmer level members, but Free members can read the SAS course – Home page and see the individual topic names.

More topics and sections are being developed, so register for free now to be kept up-to-date about all of the news, so you can take advantage of the Programmer level when it suits you best!

Are you dreaming of an Android Christmas?

Loading

Most of you will know that I have been a SAS programmer for over 30 years, but I also use other programming languages too. The first language I learnt was FORTRAN IV while I was an undergraduate at the University of York, with which I wrote the mark-up language that I used to format my thesis, and I also played with BASIC while I was at university. More recently I have developed functionality for my web sites in JavaScript, Java and Perl, and created Enterprise Guide Add-ins in VB.Net.

However, when I bought my first smartphone, a Palm Pre, in 2010, I discovered that I could write my own apps for its operating system webOS in JavaScript, and joining the webOS developer group was free. This gave me my first experience of selling apps for smartphones and tablets. Unfortunately webOS did not survive very long after HP bought Palm, so I branched out into writing apps in JavaScript for Chrome browsers, and for Android devices in Java. Now even the Chrome Web Store is no longer accepting new or updated apps, so I am left with just developing for Android devices.

My core Android apps are a series of what I call ebook apps focusing on SAS programming. They were originally developed in JavaScript for webOS, but have ported fairly well to Java, and each contains a collection of rich text “ebook” pages that display automatically scaled and formatted text and images to match your own device dimensions and orientation. You can also email out the code samples and ask new questions for future releases. The Google Play and Amazon Appstore functionality to update installed versions of these apps means that any new or updated pages are automatically sent to existing app users.

Every now and then I get “bright” ideas for games and educational apps. A number of my existing Chrome browser apps are about improving mental arithmetic, which I see as becoming a lost skill. There are 3 apps available in the Chrome Web Store called Arithmetic Brain Quest, Multiply Brain Quest and Fraction Brain Quest. Each game randomly generates 10 questions in the different categories, which must be answered correctly in the allotted to build a pile of blocks to reach the top of the screen, with a high score saved for each category.

There are also some Android puzzle solver and game apps which can be downloaded directly from my blog site, because the Google Play and Amazon Appstore functionality is not required when these apps are in their final versions. The puzzle solver apps are to help you develop or solve puzzles you may see in newspapers, magazines and on-line for Sudoku 6×6, Sujiko and Master Sujiko.

My most recent game apps are based on a board game created by Tri-Ang in 1970 called Check-Lines. The board had 11 holes joined by straight lines, and 2 players had 5 pieces each with the aim of placing them to form 2 straight lines of 3 pieces each, so 1 piece was part of both lines like an X, L, V or T. The game starts with an empty board and the players take turns to place their pieces in empty holes, and then, when all the pieces are on the board, moving one of their pieces along a straight line into the empty hole until 2 lines are created, or no move is possible. I have created 2 apps, one is a free “dumb” app Check-Lines Board which just enforces the rules, and the other app Play Check-Lines uses a simple AI to provide the 2nd player with hints, as shown in the screenshot.

Whatever you are doing at this time of the year I would like to wish everyone a very happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

I hope I’ve updated the site theme to make your reading and navigation easier

Loading

The previously installed theme was called “Twenty Sixteen”, which I published on the site in May 2016, so I thought it was time to change to a new theme, which is called “LeftSide”.

What do you think of it? I do like the navigation panel, which doesn’t get in the way and requires no scrolling to start reading the text, but I’m not so enthusiastic about the pink links, so you may find they change colour in the future, if I can work out how to update them to a more standard blue.