Given that you are from the pharmaceutical background and wish to pursue a carrier is clinical test data analysis, the I would highly recommend you start with a strong foundational knowledge in statistics. Without statistical knowledge you will never understand the tests nor its results. A regular text book on statistics will be difficult for you to follow so I suggest statistics books that are written for life science professionals. Those books contain almost all the tests and their result interpretations and also why those tests are conducted.
Secondly, As you are going with SAS, you need to learn to code the SAS, those syntax and process is not like any other so no matter what computer programming language you study it wont help. Said that the coding part of SAS is the easiest, so you can start with it and learn without previous exposure. Example of One-Way ANOVA. Knowing just the SAS and statistical methods will help you get a job but wont help you in carrier progression. In order to do that you need to understand the entire data analysis field(data storage, data analysis tools, data display, etc mentioned in previous post). It may sound difficult but if you take it one by one then you can do it. Python, R, SPSS and such wont help you, once you are in SAS you are struck with it, unless you are willing to retrain yourself. Though R is a great language, none of the research institutions use it as such and management want shiny graphs and realtime display, so use R to gain knowledge about statistical methods and for doing private analysis to gain working knowledge.
Hope this helps
