Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it. -Rene Descartes

A great quote to apply to many things in life, including this path towards certification. Realizing that I needed a review, I enrolled in a three day, onsite Programming I class here in Cary. I have taken this same class before but this time was the charm. Having never had experience in any programming language before taking SAS Programming class last January, the first time around was a bit overwhelming by the afternoon of the second day. There was so much information to understand and so many rules to know.

I’m happy to say that this time around it was a lot easier for me to grasp the concepts of this class. The course is divided into 12 chapters with multiple exercises within the chapters. Each set of exercises has three levels of difficulty. I set a goal in day one of class to complete at least the first two levels in each exercise set and was pleased to accomplish this. Now as I’m back at my desk and in the office, I’ve made it my next goal to go back through the course notes and complete exercise number 3 from each set.

Also, in my research the other day, I found some information that might be helpful to others. First, for more practice and challenges working within SAS, the following two titles are great: An Array of Challenges-- Test Your SAS Skills and The SAS Workbook and Solutions Set. An Array of Challenges is a book of programming problems designed to test your knowledge of SAS – no need for software with this book. The workbook set is a hands-on tool to guide you through programming problems and is good for beginning through advanced SAS programmers.

Second, I’m lucky that because I work at SAS I have a plethora of SAS experts who can answer any question I seem to throw their way, but, you might not be quite as lucky. Therefore, we have a resource where users can interact with one another on our SAS Discussion Forums. And, lastly, we also have the sasCommunity.org (I love the tip of the day!) site that is organized by you, the SAS User. Use the resources we have with books, training, user interaction and our Samples & SAS Notes to divide and conquer the challenges you’re having with programming.

I’d like to end this blog on a different note. This week Fortune magazine named SAS the number 1 place to work in the US. Way to go SAS!