{"id":82,"date":"2007-11-15T02:01:35","date_gmt":"2007-11-15T06:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/programmer\/getting-help-with-sas\/"},"modified":"2007-11-17T15:15:49","modified_gmt":"2007-11-17T19:15:49","slug":"getting-help-with-sas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/programmer\/getting-help-with-sas\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Help with SAS"},"content":{"rendered":"<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/res\/images\/sas_source.png\" alt=\"SAS source code\" class=\"right\"\/>\r\n\r\n<p>There was some <a href=\"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/programmer\/sas-lag-problems\/#comment-14004\">discussion<\/a> in one of my SAS posts about where to find SAS help and communities. It seemed like a pretty useful topic so I thought I&#8217;d expand it a bit and make a post out of it. First, let me say I&#8217;m not the most knowledgeable since I&#8217;m more of a find-wall-bang-head type of programmer but I did my best to dig up some possible answers. If anyone has any other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.<\/p> \r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>To start with, there&#8217;s always the official online <a href=\"http:\/\/support.sas.com\/documentation\/onlinedoc\/91pdf\/index.html\">documentation<\/a> although this tends to be more for polishing something you already know how to do than starting cold.<\/li>\r\n<li>Speaking of official, there&#8217;s also the official <a href=\"http:\/\/support.sas.com\/forums\/index.jspa\">SAS forums<\/a>. I didn&#8217;t know about these until I started looking around for this post so I can&#8217;t say much about them but the topics they have available seem rather specific and I can&#8217;t figure out where one would go to post a basic question.<\/li>\r\n<li><ins datetime=\"2007-11-17T18:23:59+00:00\"><i>Edit:<\/i>There&#8217;s also the <a href=\"http:\/\/support.sas.com\/resources\/\">SAS Knowledge Base<\/a> that has a lot of good papers and notes detailing SAS features complete with sample code and explanations. It&#8217;s really useful if you&#8217;re a learn by example type. (Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sas.com\/sascom\">Alison<\/a> for pointing this one out).<\/ins><\/li>\r\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/programmer\/sas-lag-problems\/#comment-15278\">Kelly Levoyer<\/a> of SAS points out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sascommunity.org\/wiki\/Main_Page\">SAScommunity.org<\/a> which seems like it is a little sparse but does have a surprisingly long list of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sascommunity.org\/wiki\/Category:Bloggers_Corner\">SAS-related blogs<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n<li>The SAS company also appears to have jumped on the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sas.com\/\">blogging band wagon<\/a> although really only <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sas.com\/sasdummy\/\">SAS Dummy<\/a> looks helpful for learning SAS at the moment.<\/li>\r\n<li>The only place that seem to be available for asking general question is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.listserv.uga.edu\/archives\/sas-l.html\">SAS-L email list<\/a> (which I just found out is the same as the <a href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\/group\/comp.soft-sys.sas\/about\">comp.soft-sys.sas<\/a> Usenet group). There&#8217;s a nice paper on <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.sas.com\/proceedings\/sugi29\/247-29.pdf\">SAS-L etiquette<\/a> (mostly do your homework first) (found via the sascommunity site).<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n<p>Offline, there are also <a href=\"http:\/\/support.sas.com\/usergroups\/\">SAS user groups<\/a>. I often get emails from our local one but I&#8217;ve never actually gone. The SAS company also has trainers that travel and teach quick classes. Our university stats department brought in one to teach a couple short two-day classes about statistical functions and macros. The classes were pretty good although I&#8217;m not sure how much it cost or how frequent they are. It might be worth checking on if you&#8217;re near a university.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Finally, you can also read my poor attempts at explaining <a href=\"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/programmer\/sas-macros\/\">SAS macro variables<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/programmer\/sas-macros-letting-sas-do-the-typing\/\">SAS macros<\/a>. Also, if you have any specific questions you can try asking in the comments here and if it&#8217;s not too time consuming I&#8217;ll try to lend a hand.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was some discussion in one of my SAS posts about where to find SAS help and communities. It seemed like a pretty useful topic so I thought I&#8217;d expand it a bit and make a post out of it. First, let me say I&#8217;m not the most knowledgeable since I&#8217;m more of a find-wall-bang-head [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12,11],"tags":[226,225,224,229,227,709,55],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}