Best Online SAS Course for Beginners on Udemy

So, you have decided you want to learn SAS. That’s an excellent decision! SAS Programmers are in high demand across a wide range of industries. Especially in the financial and pharmaceutical industry.

But, when it comes to learning SAS online and preparing yourself for an offical exam, there are many options. In this article, I review one of the most popular courses on Udemy.

With an audience of more than 12.500 students and an average rating of 4.5 on a scale of 5, the SAS Programming BASE certification course for SAS Beginners is one of the best online SAS courses available. After completing this course, you will be more than prepared to take the SAS BASE certification exam.

Before I continue and discuss the course in more detail, these are the most important Pros and Cons of the course.

Summary

If you want to prepare yourself for the SAS BASE Certification exam (A00-231 or A00-233), but you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on the official preparation course(s), then this Udemy course is a perfect alternative.

The SAS Programming BASE certification course for SAS Beginners consists of more than 12 hours of videos, 35 articles, and many quizzes and exercises. The course is given by an experienced instructor and covers all the obligatory topics (and more) of the SAS BASE exam.

The course is intended to students who want to take the SAS BASE Certification exam, so no prior knowledge of SAS is expected.

Excelente Preparation for the SAS BASE Certification Exam

In my opinion, this is one of the best, affordable online courses to prepare yourself for the SAS BASE Certification Exam (A00-231 or A00-233). The course covers most topics that might be asked during the exam.

Course Topics

The course instructor covers all the topics step-by-step; from how to install SAS Studio on your PC/laptop, to generating reports using ODS statements.

Indeed, some of the concepts in this course aren’t part of the SAS Base Certification Exam. For example, the PROC SQL and SAS Macro functions. However, to be completely prepared for the exam, the course laks one important topic, namely the Program Data Vector (PDV).

Course Material

There are more than 12 hours of video material available, as well as various readings. In each video, the instructor covers a different concept and explains it with PowerPoint-like slides as well as SAS code from SAS Studio.

Some students say that the pace of the videos is a bit slow. However, if you change the speed of the videos to 1.5x, then this “issue” is fixed 😉

What I also liked about this course are the quizzes and programming exercises. At the end of each topic, the instructor provides a quiz and/or programming exercise (with solutions) to check your understanding and get hands-on experience. In total, there are 15 quizzes and 17 exercises. Also, the course offers a final project with clear instructions and a video solution.

Experienced Instructor

This course is given by an experienced instructor. Sharon Cheng is a certified SAS professional with more than 7 years of experience. Besides this course, she offers 3 other affordable courses on Udemy to students of different levels.

• SAS Programming Advanced Certification Course
• SAS programming Data Analysis Modeling Certification Course
• SAS programming on Reports and Tables generating

Sharon Cheng has put a lot of effort into all her courses. This results in an average rating of above 4.5 stars from the 16.000 students that have followed one of her courses.

If you have a question and reach out to her, she replies fast and answers your question.

However, this is the only option to ask questions. The course doesn’t offer a community to connect and discuss with other students. In my opinion, adding a community would make the course even better.

Course Content

These are the topics that the instructor covers in the course:

• Course Overview
• Installation of SAS University Edition
• Introduction to SAS
• Create a SAS dataset
• SAS libraries
• The ASSIGNMENT, LENGTH, and LABEL statements
• The IF/ELSE-THEN statement
• Predefined and User-defined Formats
• SAS Functions for character and numeric variables
• SAS Functions for date variables
• DO Loops
• Arrays
• Merge data
• Transpose data
• SAS procedures (such as proc print, proc sort, proc means, etc.)
• The ODS statements
• Error handling
• SAS macros
• PROC SQL
• A final case study

If you aren’t convinced by the SAS Programming BASE certification course for SAS Beginners, you might like another online SAS course for beginners: SAS Programming Complete: Learn SAS and Become a Data Ninja