Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude – Thomas Jefferson

How true this saying is for all of us in various situations. Our study group met this week for the second time and we realized that we had lofty ambitions by thinking we could study and, more importantly, retain nine chapters worth of material in two weeks. Also, we have only scheduled an hour to discuss the material we have covered. Clearly we were not going to be able to discuss that amount of material in an hour. In Stacey Hamilton’s last post, The right note, she posed the question of whether our undertaking of material was too much or not enough. Well, we realized this week that it was too ambitious of an attempt for the first session.

So we readjusted our plan with our study mate and thoroughly discussed the first chapters of both books, Certification Prep Guide and Learning SAS by Example. One question that we all got incorrect is the below.

How many program steps are executed when the program below is processed?

 Data user.tables;
    Infile jobs;
    Input date name $ job $;
  Run;
  Proc sort data=user.tables;
    By name;
  Run;
  Proc print data= user.tables;
  Run;

a. Three
b. Four
c. Five
d. Six

Each of us jumped to the same conclusion that the answer was D (6) until we looked at the answer key. Obviously when we went back and reread the question, a little more slowly and carefully this time, it was obvious the answer was A (3). We came to the conclusion, and please correct me if this is wrong, that program steps are always a statement but that statements are not always a program step. Did we get that right?

The rest of the quiz/problems in the chapter we all grasped and didn’t have questions on so we felt fairly confident in what we had learned, and most importantly, retained. The next assignment is to cover chapter 2 in the Prep Guide and the corresponding chapter in Cody’s book, which is chapter 4. These chapters cover referencing files and creating permanent data sets.

We know that we have a long way to go, but we’ve got the right attitude and know that if we just take it slowly, focus and talk with folks with more programming experience that we’ll get through this.