A new version of SAS Learning Edition shipping in November 2006 is significantly expanded, with a larger subset of the features of SAS. As an indication of how much has been added, the hard disk space requirements of SAS Learning Edition 4.1 are slightly over 1 gigabyte, up from 390 megabytes for the previous version, which was numbered 2.0.
Just as important, the new version is built on SAS 9.1.3, so students can use it to learn the features of the latest version of SAS.
As before, SAS Learning Edition has limitations that make it suitable mainly for learning. It runs only on professional versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, it processes only a limited number of input records in a step (now 1,500), and it expires after about two years (on December 31, 2008, the same expiration date as version 2.0).
SAS Learning Edition includes components from Enterprise Guide 4.1 along with Base SAS, SAS/STAT, SAS/GRAPH, SAS/QC, and SAS/ETS. It is priced at $199. SAS recommends it for students and professionals learning SAS or trying out specific features of SAS and for those preparing for SAS Certification Exams.