Tell me something about Alfred, male or female? age? height and weight?

Oracle database (version 9 and below) had a well known default demo account SCOTT with a password, TIGER (and TIGER was the name of the real person Bruce Scott ’s cat, see) and in this account, there are some tables named DEPT, EMP, BONUS and SALGRADE (you can read their meaning). Almost every Oracle DBA learn SQL using these database and an joke just says that in DBA’s meetings, people just  warm up saying “how about Smith?” And you should know that in the database, Smith is a clerk and his boss is Ford (whose boss is Jones)!

In the beginning I also raise a question for SAS programmers: who is Alfred? Don’t give quick answer such that “Alfred who”. Actually, you should already go through with Alfred very well as a SAS programmer:

proc print data=sashelp.class;
    where name="Alfred";
run;

As a clinical SAS programmer, I play with data, get acquaintance with the data and subjects and then subjects are no longer “subject”. They have identities and  Alfred is a 14 years old boy. I have such habit mostly because in clinical world, data are very expensive (not like the massive transaction data in financial industry) and should be took more care.

I dare say that “class” is the most famous SAS dataset in sashelp library and then in the SAS world. The first dataset used for demo is almost this “class”. I just did a quick Google search, “sas sashelp.class” returns about 44,400 results. Hope you can find any other SAS datasets to beat it.

Alfred in “class” pops into my mind because today, I do find a strong candidate. In SAS 9.2 (and 9.3), the sashelp library has a new member, Iris. YES, it is the “Fisher Iris Flower Data”, which can be safely considered the most famous and most  used dataset in machine learning and data mining papers and statistical applications. Currently it has only 859 hits in Google, I think the number will reach high accompany with the wide use of SAS 9.2 and above, and to enforce my prediction, I will definitely play with the Iris data in the following future!

Kirk Paul Lafler drafted a checking list for identifying a SAS nerd (or geek, in its positive ways) in one of his intriguing papers:

You Could be a SAS® Nerd If . . .

Here I’m glad to find that I am roughly a 20% SAS nerd (12 matched in all 57 lists):

8. You blog SAS-related comments and technical solutions frequently.

9. You have more than five SAS blogs in your RSS feed.

10. Your home page is support.sas.com, sasCommunity.org, SAS-L, or LexJansen.com.

11. You know more than ten SAS keyboard shortcuts.

12. You get excited when you find a new match-merge technique that performs better than the one you developed the week before.

21. You have more than one version of SAS on your machine or network so you can compare and contrast program, processing and output differences.

28. You spend your Friday evenings and weekends responding to SAS-L posts, entering sasCommunity blog entries, and reading the latest “hot” SAS topic on LexJansen.com.

38. The first thing you read in the morning is the “Tip of the Day”.

45. You subscribe to five or more SAS groups on LinkedIn, sasCommunity, and Facebook and you use a tabbed browser so you can be online with all of them at the same time.

47. You spend your evenings and weekends SAS-L’ing, Googling and Binging looking for elegant SAS technical solutions.

50. You proudly proclaim that you’re a SAS programmer when asked by a fellow passenger, “What do you do for a living?”

51. You’re amazed when your fellow airline passenger replies, “What is a “SAS programmer?”.

I also asked Kirk if he is a 100% SAS nerd and Kirk replied, NO. He said he is a 99% SAS nerd:)

My first post on SAS bloggers begins with Rick Wicklin and I plan a series of posts. It would be nice for a statement of rational before following pages.

As a learner, I benefit frequently from lots of high quality blogs. But I’m also slightly lazy as a reader: I read almost all blogs in Google Reader rather than returning to the original web pages and adding some comments. Here I’d like to post a series of SAS bloggers and their blogs (that I subscribed and read frequently) to extent my thanks, share with friends and sometimes amuse the bloggers themselves:)

In this page, honor belongs to Jian Dai and his Yahoo group, “SAS Academy”:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/sas_academy/

Wait. You may ask: a Yahoo group?

Jian actually is a blogger for a collective blog, Clinical Trial New Technologies & Best Practices. But here I’d like to refer this Yahoo group which actually serves as his own blog and I also use Google Reader to subscribe its RSS feed:

launched at December of 2008

444 posts till July 2011, averagely 14 posts per month (and roughly 1 post for every 2 days!)

And all in all, most (and almost every) posts are under Jian’s name and few posts come from other’s hands are just outlier-like(less than 10). Note that I just read all the historical messages in a weekend and got the impressions. In the following page, I might retrieve all the data from the SAS Academy and supply accurate reports.

Recently Jian posted a C implementation of a SAS tokenizer based on Finite-state Machine(FSM). A tokenizer is a lexical analyzer of a specific programming language and in this case you can just imagine it is a small part of SAS Supervisor to recognize all tokens. In SAS Academy, Jian posted lots wonderful (and beautiful) implementation of lots of general or specific problems using C, Perl, JScript, JavaScript, PowerShell, VBS/VBA, . . . and even ProLog, a general logic programming language!

Wait wait. You may wonder: is Jian a SAS programmer?

I don’t know how Jian identify himself as a programmer and it would be best to leave this question to himself. But don’t worry. There is no such phrase engraved at the door of Jian’s SAS Academy:

Let no one ignorant of C/Perl enter.

Actually Jian is a SAS/statistical/clinical programmer by job and he of course has lots of interesting SAS codes posted, including SAS implementation of Lambda Expression and recursion(Jian is also an active conference speaker on this topic). –Some clinical programmers without any computer background would find it difficult to understand the CS part even of Jian’s SAS codes, for example, Lambda Expression. Suggestion: Google it and you will enter a totally new joy world.

Jian plays like a geek, and he is always making efforts to extend the horizon and scope of SAS programming language by taking advantage from computer science(actually he had some posts titled play like a CS pro). I have great experience by exploring Jian’s SAS Academy and very often, a popular book title pops up in my mind:

Programming Pearls

If you want sometimes programming for fun, just for fun, that’s it.