SAS Certification Prep Guide: Base Programming for SAS 9, Fourth Edition

Having passed the SAS base exam with a 94% recently, I can tell you that if you are studying for the exam, the only real benefit of this book is that it lists out the topics on the exam. You can get that from the table of contents without buying the book. There are a ton of really egregious errors in this book. There was a quiz question regarding setting a label which said the correct answer was something with a critical typo. For a test that is so pedantic about syntax this is really frustrating. It even crossed my mind that perhaps the SAS institute put misinformation in the book deliberately to make more money on tests.In any case, the book you will want is the little SAS book. And just cross reference it with the table of contents to know which parts to skip (you wont need most of chapters 8, 9 and 10 in the little sas book for the base exam)

First off, this is not the book you want to buy if you are new to SAS. Instead, start with The Little SAS Book and the accompanying Exercises and Projects For The Little SAS Book. The SAS Certification Prep Guide touches upon a wide variety of basic SAS tasks, such as importing and exporting data, merging and filtering data sets, the output delivery system (ODS), and a few basic PROC steps such as PROC PRINT, PROC CONTENTS, PROC FORMAT, PROC FREQ, PROC MEANS.The practice problems at the end of each chapter seemed easier than the questions asked on the SAS Base certification exam. The actual certification exam is full of answers that all seem very similar with only subtle differences and I wished that the SAS Certification Prep Guide questions were more similar in difficulty to the questions asked on the certification exam.I purchased the Kindle version and worked through the book on a computer through Kindle Cloud Reader. There are a few frustrating issues that make the book seem unpolished. First, there is no table of contents and I had to add my own bookmarks to better navigate between each chapter and the chapter quiz answer keys. Second, all the characters were either really large or really small and I could not get this book to display well no matter how much I changed the font size, margins, or colors settings.Overall The SAS Certification Prep Guide is worth the purchase and I can think of a few specific problems I would have gotten incorrect if not for this book. Hopefully the Kindle version will get an update to address the missing table of contents and font issues.

I'm not sure why this gets such bad reviews, but this guide was great for SAS Base Certification prep. The questions on the real exam were very similar to the practice questions in the book. The reading sections were also excellent. Make sure you go through the entire book and then do selected sections as needed to brush up; I did this and got a very good score on my first try.This book alone will not get you a good score. You need a supplemental book that actually goes through step-by-step programming, or a class. I used this to supplement a class I took, used it as review. There is a programming by example book that SAS has published that is sufficient to actually learn the programming. It is an exam prep book, not a class curriculum.

If you are learning SAS, this book is worth every penny. It has almost anything you would need SAS related outside of what the advanced book covers. It doesnt have a lot of examples, so other training is reccommended. However, this is like a Bible when it comes to SAS because you can look up anything when you need to remember what to do in a situation or better explain something you just dont quite remember. Highly reccommend. It is costly but worth it.

For such a costly book, I was expecting it to be at least comprehensive in covering the types of questions that appear in the exam. But the sample questions posted by SAS are still more challenging than the content of this book - so relying on this book solely and solving exercises at the back doesn't guarantee that I won't be left baffled on exam day. I am now fumbling around the internet trying to find more practice for SAS to make sure I am fully prepared).

Some of the quiz answers are wrong in the appendix. Overall bulky book, but the content is not up to par