Students often find SAS as a lucrative career opportunity. Good programming skills are needed to pass through the interview process.
Proper planning, right guidance and hard work can make you a skilled programmer in a few months.
On LifeProNow request, Nanigopal Panigrahi agreed to share his knowledge. He is quite a skilled programmer and associated with one of the MNC. He has summarised the whole journey to SAS into 7 steps:
SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software suite developed by SAS Institute and we can access, manage, analyze and present the data by applying SAS programming techniques
Table of Contents
Download and install SAS software/ Access the SAS studio online and learn the interface.
Practice is very important while learning any coding language, so we need to practice a lot along with the theory part. One should have a basic understanding of different windows on SAS and their use. It is one of
Learn the basic SAS programming
Once we understand how to work in SAS software, we need to learn basic SAS coding like:
How to write as SAS statements, Steps in SAS programming, SAS naming convention, data types in SAS etc.
How to create SAS dataset/ Import /Export
Next important thing is we should know how to import different datafile and create SAS dataset from that. Frequently used data files are Excel, CSV file, txt file etc. We should also learn how to export our output to different file format. It is also important to learn the concept of SAS libraries to access sas Dataset from different source.
Learn SAS functions:
SAS function are very important wile while writing programs. We should learn some of the common SAS functions from Character functions, Numeric functions and Date functions to ease our coding.
PROC SQL
We should learn basic proc sql like SQL clauses, how to select observation and column while printing a table, how to create tables in proc sql. SQL joins to merge datasets.
SAS Macro
SAS macro is very important, In the beginning we should learn different ways to create macro variables, different ways to create macro program, Macro debugging techniques etc
SAS procedures
We should learn some basic SAS procedures like proc print, proc contents, proc sort, proc freq, proc means, proc report etc.
He has created one tube channel DataCoder where he will be posting videos on SAS programming from basics. You can subscribe to the channel and watch all the upcoming videos.
