The SAS documentation is available on-line, off the web.
It's a little hard to find, but once you are there, it's a wealth of information.
I would highly recommend that you beginning reading it, as soon and as much as possible.
Yes.
SAS is not a process and control centric language, it is a data centric language. It was meant to simplify the programming efforts for people who data analysis.
The basic structure is called a DATA step.
The data step assumes that you are going to be looping through a file of "observations" (records, table rows, whatever) and doing something with the data. The name of a data step -- indata in my clue -- identifies the name of the output data set (a normal SAS binary data file). "INFILE" + "INPUT" reads data from an external data source (generally a flat file), "SET" reads data from a SAS data set. Then you simply write the code for what you want to do with that observation, and normally terminate the DATA step with "run;"
SAS is not an interpreted language, it is one of the first just-in-time compiled languages. It reads a block of code, compiles it, executes it, reads the next block of code, compiles it, executes it, etc. So, SAS is very efficient at processing large datasets, and the code is generally easy to read and maintain, given reasonable coding practices.
If you saw in my clue, that I did variable assignments after inputing the data, similarly you can do testing.
SAS supports all the normal looping control and decision structures for data.
if then else
do while
do until
The "for" loop is actually done with "do something=start to finish by interval"
SAS also has a very powerful case statement structure:
Select ( )
when
otherwise
It would probably help you most to take the time now to find the online documentation and do more reading.
And then, create a directory/folder somewhere where you can "play".
In my environment, I do exactly that. I have a "play" directory where I experiment with SAS code as an intial development. It provides a place to learn what happens. After I have a start, then I move, or create something new from scratch, to/in our actual developement environment that will be moved through change management processes into production.