SAS Fundamentals

Foundational learning path before certification

1 Who this is for

Learners building core SAS skills before tackling certification exams, including students taking structured SAS application courses.

2 Course Materials

For structured semester course content with interactive Jupyter notebooks: - Setup Guide - Configure SAS kernel for Jupyter - Course Overview - Semester materials structure and organization

3 Learning path

1. Start with syntax and data I/O
   • Read: Base Programming guide sections on DATA step basics and PROC IMPORT/EXPORT.
2. Data manipulation essentials
   • Focus: DATA step transformations, IF/ELSE, WHERE, KEEP/DROP, formats/informats.
3. Combining data sets
   • Practice: SET, MERGE, APPEND, PROC SQL joins (inner/left/full).
4. Reporting fundamentals
   • Try: PROC PRINT, MEANS, SUMMARY, FREQ; add labels/formats for clarity.
5. Quality and debugging
   • Use: SAS log review, PUTLOG, and common warning patterns.

4 Practice plan

• Rebuild small datasets from CSV/Excel, then reshape and summarize.
• Write both DATA step and PROC SQL solutions for the same task to see differences.
• Keep a personal snippet library for common patterns (imports, merges, date handling).

5 Topic directory

Add your step-by-step study notes under fundamentals/ (e.g., 01-data-io.qmd, 02-merges.qmd). The listing below will keep them ordered when you prefix numbers or dates.

6 Progressing to certification

Once you are comfortable with the basics, move into the exam-focused pages:

• Base Programming guide
• Advanced Programming guide
• Statistical Analyst guide

7 Resources

• SAS Help Center: syntax reference and examples
• SAS Communities: search for solved code snippets
• Your own logbook: record recurring warnings and how you fixed them