SAS or Statistical Analysis System as its technical name goes has by far been an undefeated champion when it comes to the data programming tools. In the industry of data science, this licensed tool has been ruling the roost both in terms of the number of users and the recommendations. Although today, the momentum of its popularity is facing roadblocks majorly in terms of an increasing number of open sourced tools and super interactive community forums.
Whatever may be the case, this tool still happens to hold a huge chunk of market share in the industry. A steady growth has been documented, especially in terms of the jobs in countries like the US, UK and India, where employers are on the lookout for professionals trained in SAS. Another major factor that works immensely in favor of SAS is that it is one tool which can be learnt very easily. This may be the reason why many aspirants are advised to start off their journey with SAS owing to its flexibility and user-friendly nature.
Related Article: What is SAS?
So if you happen to be one such aspirant who wants to learn how to work with SAS but doesn’t know how to make the head or tail of it, then you’ve come to the right place. Here we arm you with an ideal set of tips which you must follow to gain momentum with SAS. A point of disclaimer is that this is an ideal way and could very well be customised by you.
- Find out the reason why exactly you want to learn SAS, talk to people who you know are involved in the industry and get their valuable inputs. Once you have cemented your base, go ahead and download a university edition by creating a SAS profile. You will also be required to download VMware or Oracle Virtual Box to make the software compatible.
- A few things to remember about the university edition of SAS would be that firstly, it works only on 64-bit machines and you will have to download the Oracle Virtual Box well before you begin downloading the software.
- Once you’re done with this, you would find it really helpful to go through the Base SAS training program that is provided on sas.com. This is free and promises to teach you the basics of the tool in about 24 hours. Just remember to solve all the quizzes.
- It is usually advised that once your basics of SAS are clear, you must try and look into learning SQL. Once you do that it would help you out with accessing the data. There is no hard and fast rule about this as you can, even go about your data managing jobs without learning SQL.
- Take up the learning of descriptive statistics, look into online free courses or paid courses which would teach you the same. Once you are done with the primary path, you can diversify your learning into inferential statistics, linear and logistic regression, decision trees, clustering and segmentation and so on.
If you happen to feel that going through this whole process on your own could be quite tedious, then don’t fret at all. Today there happen to be many esteemed institutes like Imarticus Learning which offer many comprehensive courses in tools like SAS Programming which you can opt for.
