Recommended Python learning path for SAS / CAS programmers

[acordes]

Dear community,

given the fact that each additional language requires less effort to learn and that most of the courses out there are targeted to learn Python from scratch, does anyone know a Python course that's designed purposely for sas users so that I can optimize my learning advancement?

Apart from sas code and cas language action sets, I'm comfortable with IML code and I know basics of matlib as well. I share this so that my personal shopper can advice me even better 😂 

Or perhaps there are papers like 'using SAS Viya from Python' that I miss out.

Thanks. 

[JosvanderVelden]

Have you looked at these pages:
https://developer.sas.com/guides/python.html
https://blogs.sas.com/content/tag/python/
https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/v_030/caspg3/titlepage.htm
https://www.coursera.org/learn/sas-viya-rest-api-python-r
https://www.lexjansen.com/cgi-bin/saspapers_query.php (search for keyword python to find papers; there is one titled "How I Learnt Python in 15 Days").

[Stu_SAS · Accepted solution]

Hey Arne! I recently went through the below course on Udemy and really liked it a lot. It gave me a good general understanding of the Pythonic way of doing things. From there, learning how to use SWAT, SASPy, and DLPy will be really easy.

https://www.udemy.com/course/python-for-machine-learning-data-science-masterclass/

If you're really wanting to get more into data cleaning with Pandas, this is also a great course:

https://www.udemy.com/course/the-ultimate-pandas-bootcamp-advanced-python-data-analysis/

If you took both of those, you'd be a Python master and be able to really do some fantastic Python and Viya integration together.

What's really nice is that you'll be able to use IML, the DATA Step, SQL, and Python all together for each of their strengths. For example, JSON is really easy to manipulate in Python. You can parse JSON in Python, convert it to a data frame, then convert that into a SAS dataset for advanced data manipulation with the DATA Step, SQL, and CAS.