Hi:
Thanks for the compliment. Long ago, (in a galaxy far, far away) I was a Literature student who discovered that there were no good jobs for someone who could deconstruct Faulkner, Melville, Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot. And, so I aimed myself at a programmer trainee job; learned Fortran, Cobol, JCL SAS and Easytreve.
But SAS was actually the very first programming language I learned, before the programmer trainee job even started. So when I got the opportunity to be a "real" programmer, one of my choices was to work in the Cobol side of the shop or the "ad-hoc" SAS side of the shop. I chose working on the SAS side of things and have been using SAS ever since.
So it's been a very, -very- long time that I have worked with SAS. I don't know "everything" about SAS -- but I do know how to look things up in the documentation. And, there's the whole puzzle aspect of solving a problem that I find appealing.
My students all speak highly of these authors: Cody, Carpenter, Delwiche/Slaughter, Burlew and Haworth. But there are many other good books available on different topics (For example, I don't teach Stat classes, so I don't know what Stat-related books are most useful.)
The best advice I can give you is learn how to use the resources on support.sas.com -- the search facility, the documentation, the samples and the repository of SAS Global Forum papers. And, don't be afraid to ask yourself "what if" questions and test out your theories or ideas in a test program on sample data.
Good luck!
cynthia