forum – Page 3 – Holland Numerics: Blog and Forums

My published Training Course list is for companies, the SAS course is for individuals

I published a list of available training courses for 2017 in January this year, but this course list is actually intended for companies, and not for individuals, as the courses have a fixed price no matter how many people attend them. All the training materials are personalised and supplied in digital form, and so can be duplicated for that client to re-use internally.

Individuals looking for SAS training should subscribe to the SAS course in the SAS Programming Forum instead, which is specifically targeted at individual SAS learners and programmers, and is priced as a low-cost monthly subscription. However, the SAS Programming Forum is not just there for the SAS course, but can be used to get answers to any SAS-related questions you may have too, even if they are from homework or interview questions.

Fast – Cheap – Good – Pick any 2!

Fast - Cheap - Good I’m sure you’ve seen this sign many times before, but it is a very important statement!

At Holland Numerics we strive to provide good service at all times, so we will never even consider providing fast service cheap, because it will not be good! That said, we can provide good service fast, but it won’t be cheap, and good service cheap, but it won’t be fast.

Sometimes we have to sit back and consider Oscar Wilde’s view (from his play “Lady Windemere’s Fan”) that at his point in time a cynic, but now everyone, knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing! This is particularly relevant for consultancies like Holland Numerics trying to determine appropriate pricing for consulting services.

That is why the SAS Programming Forum is accessed for a small subscription, not because we need it to be an income stream, but because we want to make certain that subscribers really want to access the valuable SAS-related information I have added over several months in that forum. I like to think this is perfectly exemplified by another quote, this time from my all-time favourite novel “Time Enough for Love” by Robert A Heinlein:

“Anything free is worth what you pay for it.”

What is the SAS Programming Forum and why does it cost to access?

It is rather sad that everyone knows the price of everything and the value of nothing! I have paraphrased this statement somewhat from the original written by Oscar Wilde for Lord Darlington in “Lady Windemere’s Fan”, but the reality is very much in evidence everywhere today. But how is that relevant to the SAS Programming Forum?

I wanted to create a place where students of SAS programming (which includes myself, as I try to learn something new about SAS every day) could ask SAS-related questions, even if they were from interviews or homework, without being criticised. However, I wanted to exclude those asking questions because they were too lazy to research the answers themselves (#LAZYWEB), so I hoped that charging a small amount to access the forum would filter out those trying to get free information with no effort, but encourage those enthusiastic enough to pay to learn about SAS an opportunity to do so. The SAS Programming Forum subscription is only GBP 5.00 per month for up to 3 months via PayPal, so it can be stopped at any time, but also renewed easily, and includes access to my SAS course about SAS programming topics, which I’m progressively building, and currently includes 4 sections on SAS components, Data Steps, PROC SQL and SAS macros, and now totals 25 topics in all. The sections are intended to be read sequentially, but are, for the most part, independent of each other. The key feature of the SAS Programming Forum and the SAS course is that questions can be asked at any time and they will be answered, provided sufficient information is given in the question. This is not a “get out” clause, but a learning point for all prospective SAS programmers that without sufficient information you cannot write a SAS program that meets the customer’s needs, so you have to be able to ask question yourself!