j********t 发帖数: 201 | 1 Spending time getting a SAS certificate is wasting time if you follow the
current fashion: read the exam questions, remember the answers, then get 90%
pass. You do not learn SAS. You waste your brain cells. You do not
increase much your chance of getting a job in the pharm industry either
since most hiring managers know kids can get that certificate easy.
However, I still encourage you to get the certificate since people from
other industries might take it seriously; and most importantly, you can
learn SAS via these exam questions if you take a healthy route. If your
goal is to learn SAS skills then these questions can really help you because
they cover all SAS areas. After you've really obtained SAS skills, go to
get a certificate; you might get less than 100%, but you will not easily
forget these skills just as you've learnt how to drive. Skills help your
life; scores help your name.
Thus said, here are the steps your should take:
1) Read the little book (by far the best introduction to SAS for most
people, I personally would recommend a book published in 1970s but it is out
of print). Read it quickly. Do not try to remember everything, but
remember the important concepts.
2) Grouping all major concepts into one table in word or excel, explain
the concepts yourself – that is, organize the books by tabling its concepts
or examples.
3) Do the SAS exam questions, understand why you are wrong, do not try to
remember everything.
4) Try to place each question in the table you’ve made from reading the
little book; if you cannot find where to place one question, then re-read
the little book or do googling to find some SAS papers. Now you have one
table holding all important SAS knowledge.
5) Read your table while drinking a cup of team see if you can understand
everything…. If not, try to get that little book and SAS questions.
Steps 1-5 may help you to get SAS knowledge and skills and you can certainly
pass the Exam. However, to learn a language is to open a new world and to
gain new power. Now you know SAS, how can it help you make your life better?
I personally like to download all my credit cards info into a text file and
let SAS categorize all the spending then do some analysis, categorical or
continuous….
To illustrate my point and to invite participation from you guys, let me
make a small project from this forum:
After reading a few posts, I really feel sympathetic to someone who is
selling a book for 2 baozi
http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/Statistics/31335361.html
The sale’s person promised to email all the people who want to buy during
the weekend. Without further asking if the baozi are really well done
without any “di gou you”, the seller would have to send quite a few emails
. The current situation as I’m writing is not bad, the seller can still
handle it. Imagine there are 100 sales, or 200 or 1000 ….I don’t know if
the weekend is enough to send 1000 mails manually. Here is what you can do
to help the seller:
1) Open that post, right click your mouse, get source, and then copy it
into text file.
2) Read in the file.
3) Get the email address who wants to buy the book into a SAS dataset
4) Write the result SAS dataset into excel file.
5) Read in the excel file, get the email address, email each buyer by
writing a thank you note with attachment of a pdf file(or whatever file you
want to use).
All step 2-5 must be done in SAS 9.2 or SAS9.3 (not sure if SAS9.1 has the
email functionality).
You can post your results here or send it to me . I want to see 3 files (
text file, excel file, SAS file) and then we can discuss where we can
improve.
BTW:
Here is a very good post about how to prepare certificates hurry to read it
otherwise when the author has realized how valuable it is a copyright might
be applied and you might to pay your real baozi to get it:
http://www.mitbbs.com/pc/pccon_9945_171647.html | p********a 发帖数: 5352 | | l****u 发帖数: 529 | |
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