SAS Tech Report

March 2018
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Dear Reader,

In general, I have a terrible memory. While many people can remember details about their childhood home, the first day of kindergarten or their second-grade teacher’s last name, I’m pleasantly surprised when I remember what I had for dinner last night. But there is one memory I have from my childhood that really stands out. The Scholastic Book Fair that came to my elementary school was the highlight of every school year.

I have vivid memories of the feel (and smell) of the newsprint paper catalog that would come home a week or so before the event. I would study that preview catalog for hours trying to decide on the four – or if my mom was feeling generous, maybe five – books I’d get to purchase on the day of the book fair. It was a fun, if a little sneaky, way for my teachers to encourage me to learn.

If you’re a SAS® user, every day can be a book fair day. That’s because SAS Books offers hundreds of print and e-book titles written by SAS experts. You’ll find books on a variety of topics for all skill levels – from beginner to advanced.

If you’re a SAS programmer or just getting started, we have a full menu of books to help advance your programming skills. Our Getting Started library includes some of our most popular programming titles, including The Little SAS Book, Learning SAS by Example or An Introduction to SAS University Edition.

One of our newest titles, Practical and Efficient SAS Programming: The Insider's Guide, gives practical advice for improving your programs, whether you’ve been programming for a month or 20 years. If you want to get a taste of some of the topics covered in this title, check out the free book excerpt: “My Favorite Functions.”

If you’re interested in SAS certification, a number of SAS users swear by our SAS certification prep guides. There are prep guides for both the Base Programming for SAS®9 (now in its fourth edition) and the Advanced Programming for SAS®9 exams. These comprehensive resources cover all of the objectives tested on the exams and are a great way to prepare.

If you’re not in the US, or you don’t feel the need to mark up pages with a highlighter, SAS offers many of our titles as e-books as well, including a collection of free e-books on the latest SAS solutions and analytics technology. You can download any of a number of titles directly from our website. Finally, check out our upcoming titles for a glimpse at some forthcoming publications.

So take a moment to check out books or e-books from SAS. Though they may not be as colorful as the Clifford the Big Red Dog books I got in first grade, I promise they’ll help make you a better SAS user.

Thanks for reading,

Larry LaRusso
Editor, SAS Tech Report
Follow me @lalaru102

SAS® Tips and Tricks

Understanding and interpreting your data set

Don’t jump into modeling. First, understand and explore your data! This is common advice for many data scientists. If your data set is messy, building models will not help you to solve your problem. In order to build a powerful machine learning system, we need to explore and understand our data set before we define a predictive task and solve it. This blog post will provide an overview of techniques that can help you to better know your data.

Data-driven content: Leveraging third-party visualizations in SAS® Visual Analytics

Data-Driven Content is a new report object in SAS Visual Analytics 8.2 that allows you to expand the already extensive number of charts and plots that SAS Visual Analytics offers by leveraging commercial or open source JavaScript frameworks for visualization. Learn more in this article from SAS’ Renato Luppi.

Top 10 platform administration tasks

In this nine-minute video, SAS’ David Stern shares the top 10 tasks he believes platform administrators should carry out to keep their SAS Platform running smoothly. He’ll also share additional resources every SAS administrator should know.

If it’s sensitive, mask it with data suppression

For any of a number of reasons, it’s often important for organizations to protect sensitive or confidential data. The Data Suppression feature in SAS Visual Analytics 8.2 is easy to use when you need to selectively suppress aggregated data values in your reports. Learn how in this SAS Users blog post.

Solutions to common DATA step tasks

In 32 years as a SAS consultant at the Federal Reserve Board, Bruce Gilsen has seen his share of questions about common SAS tasks. This SAS Global Forum paper presents the most common questions related to basic DATA step processing from his previous "Tales from the Help Desk" papers, and provides code to explain and resolve them.

SAS® SQL: An introduction

Get to know PROC Structured Query Language (SQL) from the ground up with this Ask the Expert webinar. This session gives you a basic introduction to PROC SQL. Join us and learn about basic SQL queries and syntax, creating columns, subsetting and conditional logic, an introduction to joins, creating macro variables and more. Register for the live event or view on demand.

Making the case for selectively backing up metadata

If you’re administering a SAS 9.4 environment, you’re likely running full backups. You’re prepared for anything, right? Well, I’d like to propose a scenario to you. You probably have users responsible for creating reports, maybe even very important reports. What if something happened to one of these reports? Sometimes restoring a full backup might help one user but inconvenience your other users. With a little more preparation, you could “magically” restore a single report if needed.

From SAS® Communities

Promotion from SAS® Visual Analytics 7.x and 8.x to 8.2

If you want to take advantage of the latest and greatest offered by SAS Visual Analytics 8.2, but wonder how to move the content you have developed in the past into the latest release, this series of three articles is for you. We start with a quick overview, and in the next two articles talk about promotion of SAS Visual Analytics 7.x content (7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4) followed by promotion from SAS Visual Analytics 8.x (8.1 and 8.2) into SAS Visual Analytics 8.2.

To standardize data or not to standardize data – that is the question

Have you ever wondered if you should standardize or normalize multiscaled data prior to running analyses? Our bet is you have. In this SAS Communities Library post, SAS’ Diana Shaw shares her findings and recommendations, then provides code snippets to address multiscaled data using either SAS 9.4 or SAS® Viya® environments – complete with code and videos!

How to quickly reduce data size

Have you ever wanted to quickly reduce clutter from a data set that is far too large? Want to do things like delete unwanted variables and remove duplicate observations with the click of a button? The Data Size Reduction custom task allows you to delete variables from their data sets, as well as delete duplicate records and outputs a new data set with their specified name. Learn more.

SAS® News

A conversation with SAS® Global Forum 2018 Chair Goutam Chakraborty

Recently, I sat down with Goutam Chakraborty, PhD, to talk with him a bit about this year's conference, which takes place April 8-11 in Denver. I left excited about SAS Global Forum 2018, and at the expense of losing credibility as a fair and balanced reporter, convinced that Chakraborty is one of the nicest individuals you'll ever meet.

6 new SAS books for 2018

Brush up on your SAS programming skills or begin your goal to become SAS certified. Here are six new SAS titles for 2018. You can also sign up for our monthly communication to have announcements of SAS books delivered to your inbox.

Register for SAS® Global Forum 2018

Join us for the largest gathering of SAS users in the world. SAS Global Forum will attract more than 5,000 SAS professionals for several days of learning and networking. There’s still time to register; the event will be held April 8-11 in Denver.

SAS^® Tech Report

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