New to SAS - need help getting started

My department maintains all sorts of jobs and reports based on SAS, in a mainframe/batch environment (ie ugly JCL green screens).

I have been enrolled in an expensive training program from the SAS Institute. One of the first parts of the training asks me to install files from a zip file. "Open SAS" and run some files. I can't "open SAS" because I don't have it. It is embedded on the mainframe.

They provide some extremely limited instructions to work in z/OS. but I can't even figure out the basics like how to make a dataset to put the learning file into. They really give no guidance. They assume you already know how to use SAS.

Anyway, the training shows examples in Windows using SAS Enterprise Guide. I would like to get that and use it instead, at least for learning the SAS language. But when I called SAS just to find out if that is开发者_运维问答 a free download, or if not how much it would cost, they said they would call me back and never did. So I just want to know a ballpark for how much it would cost me to get this tool. Also, if I had that tool, would I be able to use it to access the jobs on the Base SAS that I already have (on the mainframe) or would I have to purchase another Base SAS for Windows? I haven't been able to find answers to these questions via a Google search, and the SAS company didn't call me back. Can anyone with more knowledge about this help me out?

As far as I know, SAS Institute does not provide their software to individuals. They work with organizations and the yearly licence could cost tens to hundreds thousand dollars, depending on the components included and the number of processors or users.

There was crippleware SAS Learning Edition but they discontinued it.

I wonder if you can ask for refund for your expensive training program. Alternatively, you can try to run SAS scripts in batch mode on your mainframe. There are some third-party solutions for IDE like EMACS Speaks Statistics (ESS). You will lose functionality like dataset viewer.