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.
Are you attending SAS Global Forum in April this year? If you are then you have the opportunity to see me present “Making Graphs Easier to Validate – The Benefits of ODS Graphics” on Wednesday 5 April from 1100-1150hr. I’ll be in the Americas Seminar Room on Dolphin Level 5 at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida. In this presentation I’ll be talking about how to make your graphs easier to validate by using ODS Graphics and a lot of common sense!
However, maybe you are not going to be in Orlando in April, but you and your colleagues would still like to see me present on this topic. What can you do about that? Well it should still be possible, because I’m currently developing a 1/2 day training session which I’m calling “Defensive SAS Programming”. This will include “Making Graphs Easier to Validate – The Benefits of ODS Graphics”, but also “Writing Reusable Macros” and another new topic “The Art of Defensive Programming: How to Cope with Unseen Data”.
You’ll see from the link above that I don’t have to be in the room with you to present, therefore I could present through your company’s video-conferencing system from my own office at home to your conference room wherever you are instead. The “Available” and “Coming Soon” training sessions can all be booked in advance, but the “Coming Soon” training sessions will be developed specifically for you, if you are the first to request them.
Going back to “Making Graphs Easier to Validate – The Benefits of ODS Graphics”, this presentation and paper will be available for download from the Product Shop shortly after it is presented for the first time, but may also be available from the SAS Global Forum site before the conference too!
I’m looking forward to SAS Global Forum, and hope to see you there, or elsewhere in the near future!
There is now a new Training Course list for 2017, which can be downloaded from here. The courses available in 2016 are still there, but I’m developing some new SAS-related courses, based on the SAS course, which you can accelerate to production status by requesting them:
½ day SAS Data Step training
½ day SAS PROC SQL training
½ day SAS macros training
½ day Defensive SAS Programming training
Your interest in any of these courses will result in them being developed as priority tasks!
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:
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!
I’m presenting “Writing Reusable Macros” in the Coders’ Corner stream at the PhUSE Conference in Barcelona from 10-12Oct2016. You can download my paper and presentation from here.
The SAS course and the SAS Programming Forum continue to grow, I have just added a new course topic about the PROC SQL data set combining, and there are now 21 topics in 3 different sections:
I’ve also added an answer to a new SAS-related question in the SAS Programming Forum about re-ordering data sets without using PROC SORT. Again this topic can only be accessed by Programmer level members.
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!
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!
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!
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!
Anyone learning about SAS can take advantage of the SAS University Edition. This can be downloaded to your Windows or Linux platform as a free virtual machine compatible with VirtualBox or VMware Player (both free too!), or accessed online through an Amazon AWS environment (also free!). Full details about what you need to do can be found at http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/university-edition.html. Just follow the Get free software link on this web page.
Note that this version of SAS must only be used for learning about SAS, and is not intended for commercial use. The full list of permitted uses for the SAS University Edition can be found here.
You can use SAS University Edition with all of the topics in the SAS course on this site, except SAS Enterprise Guide.
While I have been working on the final topic(s) for the Data Steps section of the SAS course on the FILE & PUT statements, I have read a number of questions on the web about PROC SQL syntax. I was not going to start this section until somewhat later, but I have decided to publish the first few topics to explain some of the most useful PROC SQL syntax, so look out for the following topics in the next few weeks:
I’m sure you’ve seen this sign many times before, but it is a very important statement!