If you're just starting out with SAS one of the most common questions is how to get a free copy of SAS followed by how to find free learning resources.
I'm going to list a few here, in no particular order with my thoughts on the them.
1. SAS e-Course - Programming Essentials
This is a pretty basic course, but it will teach you the fundamentals of SAS so that when you're asking questions on the forum or else where, at least we're all speaking the same language. The statistical course is also free and is a good introduction to Statistics in SAS.
2. Videos.SAS.com
A bit newer, but this resource contains a lot of short video tutorials on how to accomplish common tasks in SAS. If you're more of the type of person who wants to do specific tasks rather than learn via a course, this is a great resource.
3. UCLA SAS Tutorials
These can be a bit outdated, but they've been revamping them lately and they're highly useful to learn how to accomplish something specific in SAS. There's a wide range of topics on this site covering everything from how to read in data, to how to interpret your statistical results and/or which statistical test you should use. For non-statistical users, this site likely has the majority of issues covered that you'll encounter.
3. LexJansen.com
Once you've covered the basics, you sometimes want to do a deep dive into a specific topic. LexJansen.com has the proceedings from may of the user conferences across North America, and the Global SAS conference. However, these are user written papers, so the quality of the paper can vary. And they do go back decades so you do want to make sure the paper you're reading is relevant today, using a newer paper on the topic is highly suggested.
4. RTM (Read the Manual)
Seriously, the SAS documentation has paid employee's who've been updating and revamping these for decades. Literally. Use them. The example section is quite thorough at providing fully worked examples that you can run on your own machine to verify the results.
5. Communities.sas.com
Well, you're here already so you know it's a resource :). One suggestion is to search well. You can do this by first narrowing down your key words for your question and/or searching only specific boards. Note that because, the content is user driven, not all questions get posted in the correct board, so first search specific boards and if you don't find what you're looking for, search the entire forum. If you're a beginner, odds are your question has been asked and answered before, so you can likely save yourself a lot of time if you search before posting a new question. And if you can't find an answer, you can still post a question :).
6. Little SAS Book
This has been in print for a while, and although I don't have a copy, I've seen it highly recommended over and over. It seems to cover a lot of the basics that programmers need.
7. Computer Science Illuminated
If you've never programmed before, it's highly helpful if you understand some basic concepts first, such as recursion, loops, boolean logic and how computers store numbers. These techniques and approaches don't change with the programming language, exactly how you implement them will, but the general idea is the same. These are becoming less necessary with the advances in computer science, but it's still worth understanding some of the basics. It will accelerate your learning process.
And learning how to pseudo-code speeds up your process a lot.
Hope this was helpful, if you have other suggestions that you think are particularly relevant please include them in the comments below.
Cheers,
Reeza
PS. I didn't include links to sites or books because they have a tendency to change over time. Most of these are easily found via your favourite search engine.
