How to Become a Good SAS Programmer

If you have read the examples in this website carefully, entered and run all sample programs successfully. You should have a fairly good understanding of the SAS language. You should be able to write simple programs to analyze data. As with any other skill, such as driving a car or playing basketball, the more you write your own program, the faster you will become a good SAS programmer.

There are three issues that will enable you to write better SAS programs:

1. Carefully debug and test you programs. Beware that a program runs without error is not necessarily running correctly.

2. There are many different ways to approach a particular programming problem. One should carefully analyze the programming and find an appropriate way to program for solving certain problem.

3. Prior planning can make programming go more smoothly. Even experienced programmers have a difficult time in writing program with no prior planning.

Perhaps the two biggest obstacle to learning how to program are lack of confidence and impatience. Lack of confidence is expressed as a feeling that programming is so difficult that only computer experts can program. By now you should have an appreciation that programming is logical and straightforward, and not that difficult. As with any other skill, it seems much harder to learn until you have mastered it. The way to build up your confidence is with experience and practice. Begin with small programs and slowly build you’re your skill to take on larger and larger programming tasks. As your skill grows, self-confidence should grow along with it.

The second problem is that people often become impatient with the prospect of having to take time to learn programming. A person may have a need for programming, but he or she may not like computers or really be interested in programming. Many people feel that computers should be easy to use that very little learning would be necessary. Perhaps, they should be, but unfortunately at the present time they are not. However, compared to 10 years ago, computer programming has already improved tremendously and anyone should be able to know how to program.

Often times the motivation to learn programming arises from a real problem that a person needs to solve. For example a graduate student needs programming to complete a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation. A researcher may need to write a program to analyze data for a research paper. Under the press of time to complete a project, it is common to become impatient with having to learn a new skill. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to learning. It takes time and practice to become proficient with the SAS language or any computer language. If you have not programming experience at all, plan on it taking time to learn the skill, and don’t become discouraged if you don’t progress as quickly as you would like.

The SAS language is a powerful tool, not only for researchers in the social sciences, but in any area where statistical data need to be analyzed. It also is of value to non-researchers who use statistical data, for example, managers, human resource professionals, and information specialists. SAS programming can be an important skill for individuals who need to manipulate and analyze statistical information. The investment of some time and effort can return a useful and often marketable skill.