SAS Studio University Edition Tutorials

[DavidBrown]

Hello

I've been trying to learn SAS for some time now, bouncing around between different SAS books and using their On Demand for Academics, and University Edition. The problem is that the books often assume that you are using the licensed version, so what is depicted in the books rarely actually works in the free versions. The SAS Documentation is so difficult to understand. It appears to be written for people who are experts in SAS. I find the most informative and understandable tutorials and information to come from "non-SAS" sources. Why do they make SAS so difficult to learn? I am about ready to throw in the towel and stick with R and Python. 

Dave

[ballardw]

Without references to specific sources I won't comment on the book or tutorial.

It may help to provide specific examples of what you are attempting in the "free" version that isn't working.  Just like other "free" or trial software, there are limits on what the software will do. It often isn't that difficult to find out the specific limitations.

I would not tout "R" as well or properly documented. I attended an in person class for basic R. Of the 30 computers in the room only 20 would run the steps the instructor, who supposedly set up the computers, in the way the training was conducted. And the problems were in different places for different computers.

Nothing like trying to run a program then finding out you have to download another module and install. Only to find that one has dependencies that need to downloaded and installed. And that was only during 8 hours of instruction.

Older training materials may not address the peculiarities of newer environments such as the University Edition or On Demand. But once the OPERATING system dependencies are addressed, like how to point to a file or folder properly the code for manipulating and using the data does not change. I can say that having worked with SAS in CMS, DOS, OS/2 and windows operating systems. I have even written code that would 1) detect the operating system and 2) address some of those system dependencies.

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:
To piggyback on this advise, I highly recommend using SAS Programming 1 and Statistics 1 e-learning classes to refresh or study SAS as a place to start. The demos in the classes are mostly recorded using SAS Studio and the way of addressing your files might be different in SAS OnDemand for Academics, local SAS or SAS University Edition in a Virtual Machine. However, once you get that difference understood, as @ballardw explains, the code is the same. For example, In the Programming 1 course, we recommend that students use a top level folder name of EPG194 (old version of class) or EPG1V2 (new version of class). Data is stored in a data subfolder. So, I would need different LIBNAME statements for different methods of using SAS mainly because the file paths would be different:

But no matter which method I was using, once the correct LIBNAME statement was issued, the code to run would be the same.And I'm not limited to using SAS Studio. I could use Enterprise Guide or even ISPF or VI as my editor (instead of SAS Studio). The path location to data is always operating system specific. With the free software we provide, there are some fixed rules for file path. Once you learn those, the 95-99% of the code you learn is not operating system dependent.
Cynthia