Last Christmas I decided to knit a scarf while at a concert in the Bahamas. A little boy and his sister sitting in front of me watched me very intently. Their eyes grew bigger and bigger as the scarf grew longer and longer. Finally the little boy couldn’t take it anymore and asked who I was knitting the scarf for. I told him it was for a homeless man I see every day on my way back to the train station and that it gets really cold in Toronto. “It gets really cold in New York. Will you knit me a scarf?” he pleaded sweetly. How could I resist that? I knitted him a scarf as well. Here he is gleefully wearing it.
This season, I can’t forget you dear readers. So here are my 3 stocking stuffers for you:
- DS2 – This is the next wave of programming languages from SAS. I taught a large public class in Ottawa in November. One big reason why you might want to consider the move to DS2 - performing work in threads. If you have always wanted to speed up your processing, here’s a great new way to do so. But wait, there’s much, much more. I’ll post another blog shortly on its features.
Interested to learn more? I’ll be teaching a new course, Object Oriented Programming, 14-15 December in Toronto. Canadian users can sign up here quickly. Gift yourself this amazing stocking stuffer or someone on your team.
- Free 21 day SAS challenge – Since I wrote my blog post, How to land a job as a SAS professional, I’ve been inundated with resumes and requests for finding work. My intention wasn’t to become a recruiter, but I do feel it’s important to share my SAS knowledge. That’s why we started the 21 day SAS challenge. We want to help potential SAS job seekers fine tune their SAS skills, and help with their job search along the way. So hurry -- grab this gift -- it starts Jan. 11, 2016. Join our LinkedIn group for this free challenge, open to anyone, living anywhere who is interested in landing work using SAS.
3. Free sample datasets - Santa has some secret datasets that you can grab completely free of charge. I found these purely by chance as I was looking around for banking data. Working in the world of data, I’m sure you appreciate why company data is secure and why we can’t share that publicly. This hidden library of datasets that I came upon is only visible after you use it in a proc contents like I did. I used the German Credit Data Set. The SAS support page has a nice variable description of this data set. Statisticians and dataminers already know this, just wanted to share these goodies with my coding family.
There you have it! My 3 gifts for you. I hope you get to use all of them. Did you enjoy my stocking stuffers? Which one did you like the most? I’d love to hear from you on how you put these gifts to good use. Wishing you happy holidays.
8 Comments
Happy New Year and Keep on doing the good work! Thanks for all the information on your Blog.
what is the Difference between SAS and SAP???
SAP SE is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations.
SAS is a software suite developed by SAS Institute for advanced analytics, multivariate analyses, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics.
feel free to check out the Support.sas.com website for more details on how SAS can help you in your work..
May I know what is sas? i am claim associate(medical, working with UHG), is this course will be helpfull to my carrier? if yes then guide me properly?
This is great, Charu! I've been a SAS programmer for over 21 years, and didn't know about the sampsio library :-) So, I appreciate the stocking stuffer.
Have a very merry Christmas!
Mark "SAS Jedi" Jordan
glad you enjoyed it Mark!! I have to tell you... I point students to your DS2 blogs.. but completely forgot to link on this post.. will fix that soon. Happy holidays!!
awesome link Michelle. thanks for passing it on. Glad you found the sampsio library helpful. Its one of those hidden nuggets that's truly worth passing on & sharing :) Happy holidays
Thanks for sharing Charu. I didn't know about the sampsio library so that's the one I like the most.
For your readers who are looking for data for teaching or learning, they may want to check out this post on communities.sas.com, https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Need-data-for-teaching-or-learning-Get-it-here/ta-p/221088
Cheers,
Michelle