All of my SAS-related PDF eBooks in the Lulu.com store are 50% off during May 2018 !!!
All of my SAS-related PDF eBooks in the Lulu.com store are 50% off during May 2018 !!!
The winner of the Book Draw at the SUGUKI April18 meeting in London was Chris Smith!
The meeting in SAS UK’s London offices was a great success. Hadley Christoffels presented on data management in the cloud after I’d presented my “Converting Plots from SAS/GRAPH to ODS Graphics” paper to a lively and appreciative audience.
A SUGUKI meeting in Edinburgh will be held on 19 April, before we return to SAS UK’s offices in London for the May meeting on 3 May. I’ll be presenting again at the July meeting, but you can find all the details about the SUGUKI meetings on their web site.
I have reported that the VIEWS web site had been closed down, and although the newsletter archive is still available on sasCommunity.org, that site is now read-only prior to being decommissioned. However, I have stored all 55 of the original VIEWS News PDF files on my blog site, which can be accessed via the VIEWS UK forum. This forum is available on request to all registered blog members, and those with access will be notified of any new content. The issues include the following features:
Some of the new content will include previously unpublished indexes I used to help me write the Formats, Options & Functions articles in the newsletters, which allowed me to see in a single view which features had already been described and when. I will also be including an authors list soon. All features that could help you find information that is difficult to find using standard searches. You also need to know that I intend to publish some new issues of VIEWS News too, but only if 100+ members request access to the VIEWS UK forum.
You might be thinking that, as I had emailed VIEWS members in the past, I could use that email list to include them automatically again. However, this new VIEWS environment has been built on an existing blog site, and, although theoretically I could register all the previous VIEWS members using their email addresses, I don’t know all of their real names and would, therefore, have to guess their new user names, so I don’t think forcing anyone to register on my blog site is at all appropriate. This is the reason I’m asking everyone interested to register themselves instead.
So, whether you have been a VIEWS member in the past, or not, here is how you can join the new VIEWS UK forum:
Note that, as I write this post, a total of 69 members now have access to the forum. If you’ve not yet requested access, then only 31 more members are required to give me the impetus to publish more VIEWS News issues!
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), 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.
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:
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.
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.
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 TeamToday, 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 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:
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!
Last month I talked about the presentation “The Art of Defensive Programming – Coping with Unseen Data” I was doing at the PhUSE Single Day Event (SDE) in Beerse, Belgium. The event was held yesterday on 28 November 2017 at the Janssen EMEA site, where I’d started my SAS contracting activities 25 years earlier. This was the 6th SDE I’d presented at in Belgium, and the 3rd on this site, so I was fairly familiar with the venue and knew many of the attendees too.
As at recent conference events I included a free draw for a copy of my latest book “SAS Programming and Data Visualization Techniques“. The attendance at the SDE was around 80 and not just coming from Belgium, with 21 of those entered the draw, and the winner was Lieke Gijsbers from OCS Consulting in the Netherlands (see me presenting her with my book in the photo).
You are probably now asking why this will be my last report from a PhUSE event? Over the last year or so I have reviewed the benefits I get from presenting at conferences and how much it costs me to attend them. Consultants spend a lot of time doing Cost-Benefit analyses and PhUSE events seemed to be moving lower down the list. The larger companies can easily afford to send multiple delegates, but a small percentage of their staff, to PhUSE events because of economies of scale. Unfortunately, Holland Numerics is not a large company, so we have to send 100% of our staff (me!). By presenting we get a 33% reduction on the full conference fee, but we lose 100% of our income during the conference and SDE days, and the same is true for every other independent consultant attending PhUSE. Next year I was hoping to combine some of my training courses with PhUSE SDE and PhUSE Connect (the new name for the annual conference!) events, but none had come to fruition.
I am extremely happy with the records I have created as a mere SAS programmer (and not a Statistical Programmer!) during my membership of PhUSE:
I would like to thank PhUSE for allowing me to present my SAS-related papers at their conferences and SDEs, but I will not be renewing my membership of the PhUSE Society as usual in January.
Are you interested in SAS macros or SAS programming efficiency? I’ve updated my Android apps focusing on both these topics in Google Play and Amazon Appstore.
ODS Graphics has been around since SAS 9.1.3 (in 2006!), and yet it hasn’t yet taken over the SAS graphics world, even though it could create the vast majority of graphs.
With this in mind I thought I’d create a quick poll to see what is currently being used out there in the real world:
If you think your company ought to be using ODS Graphics more, then download our SAS training course list for free.
If you would like to learn about ODS Graphics yourself, even if your company doesn’t want to pay for a training course for you and your colleagues, then you should read “Part III: Data Visualization” (chapters 9-14) in my book “SAS Programming and Data Visualization Techniques: A Power User’s Guide” instead.
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