what's the tips for learning SAS quickly?

[Alex_JX]

I'm a college student in Shanghai University of Finance&Economics, I begun to use SAS last week, teacher said SAS included many powerful functions.but I haven't use this software before; installed it takes a lot of times. and  I found theprogramming of SAS is very different with R,C,pyhton,stata; I major in big data economics; It's very possible that I will use SAS to analyze data in future work.I want to know how to learn the basic skills to analyze data. If you have the some special tips or experiences; I  would appreciate it if you can share it with me.

[Kurt_Bremser]

Get hold of a SAS system, if you do not already have access through your University. If not, get University Edition.

If you install UE, work through the tutorials.

Start with (free) online courses for Programming 1, and Statistics.

Be present here on the communities, and see if you can answer questions. If not, study the answers given, and try to understand them.

[PaigeMiller]

There's a joke here in the United States:

Q: "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" 

A: "Practice"

https://www.carnegiehall.org/Blog/2016/04/The-Joke

How do you learn SAS quickly?

Practice. You learn by doing.

[RW9]

Whilst there isn't an easy way to learn something new, some things are portable such as knowing logic.  Also, there is a book:

The Little SAS book:
https://www.sas.com/storefront/aux/en/splsb/65423_excerpt.pdf

Which is supposed to be very helpful.

Also there are free training videos:
https://video.sas.com/category/videos/how-to-tutorials

Plus a lot of information here on these communities.  But no real fast track, its time and learning.

[paulkaefer]

I wholeheartedly agree with what's already been said; practice is key. There are a lot of great resources on SAS.com, here (just lurk, ask/answer questions or participate in discussions as you can), and read all you can (SAS conference papers; pages at sasCommunity.org, though it is being decommissioned; SAS blogs aggregated at http://www.sascommunity.org/planet/ and http://proc-x.com/).

Based on your other language experience, yes, SAS is different. But I think you'll find it easy based on logic and other programming skills. SAS has a lot of power with built-in connections to databases, and powerful procedures that don't require a lot of manual coding effort.

Much of what I've written in SAS is essentially SQL code (that and knowing how the data step works can get you really far).

You can also learn a lot by using the Filter & Sort and Query Builder GUI tools. They produce code for you, that you can copy-paste, adapt, and save in code files.