We all love to do comparisons before reaching the final decision, right?
Whether it’s about comparison between Samsung vs. Apple when it comes to purchasing smartphones, equating contenders for forthcoming elections or choosing captain for the world cup team, evaluations and debates refine us in our life. If you love to debate on particular topic, all you need to do is turn up with a relevant question in mid of an ardent community and then watch it blow up!
I am here trying to spark something similar here. SAS course vs. R certification is probably the biggest debate in the analytics industry. There is no denying the fact that this topic goes in the mind of many students out there who want to kick start their career. So, without any further delay, let the have a quick discussion about both the certification courses to reach a conclusion which one you should opt for.
Background
SAS: SAS course has been considered irrefutably as a market leader in marketable analytics space. The software provides a huge assortment of statistical functions, as well as has decent GUI (Enterprise Guide and Miner) for folks to learn fast. Besides, it provides remarkable technical support. Nevertheless, it’s quite expensive option and is not always supplemented with newest statistical functions.
R: On the other hand, R is an Open source counterpart of SAS course, which has conventionally been mainly used in academics and research domain. For the reason that it is an open source in nature, up-to-the-minute techniques get become available quickly. There is a lot of certification available over the Internet and it is a very economical option.
Availability and Cost
SAS course is commercial software and relatively quite expensive. Still, I would say it isn’t beyond reach for most of the professionals. Yet, it holds the premier market share in private companies. Thus, until and unless you are in a company which has capitalized in SAS, it might be difficult to get a chance to work with them.
R, on the other hand, is free and can be transferred by anyone. Here are my scores on this parameter.
Ease of Learning
SAS is relatively pretty simple to learn and offers seamless option (PROC SQL) for people who already have better understanding about SQL. Even then, it has a worthy and unwavering GUI interface in its repository. In regards of resources, there are seminars available on websites of a number of universities and SAS course has a wide-ranging documentation. There are certifications from SAS training institutes, but then again you need to do good investment on these courses.
R has the sharpest learning curve and entails you to have better understanding about coding. It is a low level programming language and therefore easy techniques can take pretty longer to write codes.
Data Handling Capabilities
Last, but not the least, there was time when data handling capabilities used to be an advantage of doing effective SAS course. While R keeps everything in memory (RAM), so the computations used to be limited by the amount of RAM on 32 bit machines. However, this is no longer the case as both the languages now hold worthy data handling capabilities and possibilities for corresponding computations.
