1

The following SAS DATA step executes on Monday, April 25, 2000:


data newstaff;
set staff;
start_date = today();
run;

Which one of the following is the value of the variable START_DATE in the output data set? A. a character string with the value '04/25/2000'
B. a character string with the value 'Monday, April 25, 2000'
C. the numeric value 04252000, representing the SAS date for April 25, 2000
D. the numeric value 14725, representing the SAS date for April 25, 2000

SAS Certification preparation - First Day

As this is the first day, I have lots of enthusiasm to cover lot of topics. I started with the naming convention that can be used in SAS.The names of SAS libraries,data sets and files can only allow _, alphabets(upper and lower case) and underscore('_'). 

Second topic i covered was related to the log messages and execution of SAS programs. SAS executes programs in steps. It will start executing once it encounters PROC,DATA or RUN keywords in one go and waits till it encounters next PROC, DATA or RUN keyword. The log has data and descriptor portion. The descriptor by name has the descriptive portion relating to the data set and the data portion displays the data.

Third topic is related to the options keyword , which helps in displaying results with or without date, page numbers and number of results to display.And finally i have learnt about "firstobs" and "obs" which helps in displaying results selectively when u have lots of data.

SAS Certified BASE Programmer in 20 Days

This is the story of a recent graduate from college who is planning to achieve SAS BASE Programmer certification in 20 days. I have made a detailed planning of the topics that I am going to cover on each day . I am planning to post the crux of the topics , I have studied on each day. This might help those who are preparing for SAS BASE programmer certification for 9 version.

The pre-requisites for this being having a SAS 9 version software to execute the programs.I have already got SAS 9 software and am going to start from today. I searched enough on the net regarding feedback and guidance for this certification and I have found literally nothing . This blog will help those who want to learn SAS 9 software generically or to those who are planning give SAS BASE certification .

You can see the SAS guyz stressing on creating data sets in SAS, exporting or imporitng data from SAS to excel and other formats, syntactical or logical errors detection, basic understanding of procedures and related topics for SAS BASE Certification.

Above all this blog is for those who cannot afford the big bucks for online and e learing ,training to learn SAS.