Base_Certification_Resource_Guide.md

SAS Base Certification Reference Guide

The purpose of this is to create a free or almost free reference guide to study towards SAS certification. I fully believe the SAS Certification Prep Guide is quite good at covering the SAS material, but sometimes you need some more background or more information.

Each topic will be listed as a heading and links to the reference documents will be underneath.

This is a work in progress that will be completed over time. If you have suggestions feel free to drop me a line at stat_geek hotmail.com

Create temporary and permanent SAS data sets.

Still looking for a reference!

Combine SAS Data Sets

This one is a big issue and is such an important part of working iwth data that I'll separate this into a few different sections.

Concatenate Data Sets

https://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings/pdfs/sgf2008/085-2008.pdf

Merge Data Sets: one-to-one

SQL

https://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings/proceedings/forum2007/109-2007.pdf This covers SQL in significant detail and not all items are relevant to joins/unions though it's useful to know.

Data Step

In this case, the best reference I've come across is the documentation. The order isn't great, but it still goes over everything you need to know. I recommend reading this entire chapter. https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lrcon&docsetTarget=n1xc1y8c37apw7n1erbitmuiwvds.htm&docsetVersion=9.4&locale=en

Investigate SAS data libraries using base SAS utility procedures.

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings11/274-2011.pdf

Access an Excel workbook.

https://video.sas.com/detail/video/3862987502001/import-a-microsoft-excel-spreadsheet?autoStart=true&q=import%20excel

Create and manipulate SAS date values

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Working-with-Dates-and-Times-in-SAS-Tutorial/ta-p/424354?attachment-id=13253

Export data to create standard and comma-delimited raw data files.

https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/sas/faq/how-do-i-write-out-a-file-that-uses-commas-tabs-or-spaces-as-delimiters-to-separate-variables-in-sas/

Control which observations and variables in a SAS data set are processed and output.

Drop, Keep, & Where (note OUTPUT statement is not covered in this section). https://newonlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat481/node/13/

Lead and Lags - understanding queues in SAS

This is a good reference on how to use LEAD/LAG and the gotcha's involved in working with these functions. https://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings16/11221-2016.pdf