Course Highlight
Choosing the Introductory SAS Programming Course for You
Maybe last January you made a New Year's resolution: to learn to program in SAS. Great! But here it is September, and you still haven't gotten started. After all, there's not one, not two, but three introductory SAS programming courses from which to choose. So how do you know which course is the right course for you?To help you navigate your way, we spoke with SAS Education's Director of Training and Technical Services Linda Mitterling. Linda has worked for SAS Education for 19 years and heads up the SAS Programming Curriculum team, responsible for maintaining the current set of courses as well as planning new courses for future releases of SAS.
Linda, what's the difference between the three introductory programming courses?
Each of these courses will enable you to move forward in the Data Manager curriculum and many of the other curricula that we offer by job role. The Introduction to Programming Concepts Using SAS Software course is designed for users who have no (or very little) prior programming experience -- SAS or otherwise. This is a great place to start if you are unfamiliar with programming concepts such as files and fields and you have never written a program to solve common data analysis problems.If you have programming experience but want to know more about SAS, you should take the SAS Programming I: Essentials course instead. The SAS Programming I course is designed for students who want to learn to write SAS programs to accomplish typical data processing tasks and is a prerequisite for many other SAS courses.
If you don't plan to write SAS programs to accomplish these tasks and prefer a menu-driven, point-and-click approach, you should consider taking the Querying and Reporting Using SAS Enterprise Guide course.
Do students ever take two of the introductory courses?
Yes. If you have no programming experience, then you would take the introductory programming course to get a more gentle approach to the topics covered. After which, you could take the Programming I course to obtain a more solid foundation of the fundamental concepts involved in programming in SAS. There is some overlap in the two courses, but this is purposeful. The idea is that some topics need to be repeated to be sure that a new programmer who then learns SAS programming has a solid understanding of key concepts. However, if you have had some programming experience, such as SQL or C, then you should jump right into the SAS Programming I course.It is also possible that someone might take the Enterprise Guide course first to use SAS in a point-and-click environment and then later decide to extend the use of Enterprise Guide through programming. It would then be appropriate for them to follow up with the SAS Programming I course to master fundamental programming concepts.
What skills would a student need in order to skip the introductory courses and take the SAS Programming II course?
In order to skip straight to SAS Programming II: Manipulating Data with the DATA Step you would need to have already been programming in SAS for at least six months to a year. You would also need:- to know how to access data (from other databases or raw data files) and get that data into the form of a SAS data set.
- to be very familiar with the structure of a SAS data set.
- to know how to use conditional logic, subset the rows and columns of a SAS data set, work with SAS date values and perform simple combining techniques in SAS.
- to be able to create simple detail and summary reports using Base SAS procedures.