Learning SAS in Public | Day 03 — DATA Step, INPUT vs Direct Values & Naming Rules

Day 03 of my Learning SAS in Public journey! Today I revised everything from Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 before moving ahead, then went deep into naming conventions in SAS. In this video, I cover: ✅ Recap: creating a dataset using the DATA step, INPUT statement, and CARDS ✅ Two ways to write a dataset — INPUT + CARDS vs directly assigning values — and why the first method is preferred (less code, same result) ✅ WORK (temporary) vs permanent libraries, and why WORK data disappears after you log out ✅ Reading existing datasets using the SET statement ✅ Naming rules for datasets, variables, and libraries: → Must start with a letter or underscore, never a number → No spaces or special characters allowed → Max 32 characters (6–8 is best practice) → SAS is case-insensitive I also attempted SAS comments (the asterisk and /* */ methods) today — and honestly, I fumbled it. Kept hitting errors and couldn't figure out why. Not pretending Day 03 was perfect. I'll redo the comments section properly in the next video before moving forward. Some days you learn clean. Some days you learn messy. Still counts as learning in public. 📌 Follow along as I learn SAS from scratch and document the journey — mistakes included. #SAS #BaseSAS #LearnSAS #LearningInPublic #ClinicalSAS #DataAnalytics #Programming #CareerGrowth