Stata Statistical Software - Learning Tools

The Stata Corporation in-house press publishes manuals and related learning aids. It maintains online compilations of resources available from the company and from academics who have developed instructional or research materials.

Stata Manuals

The Stata Manuals (either Version 7 or Version 8) are required reading for mastery. Stata is of sufficiently limited scope that complete documentation of its facilities fills a manageable number of volumes. [Note, if you purchase a Stata license under the GradPlan, you will have options for choosing documentation sets of more or less completeness.] The key manuals are:

• Getting Started with Stata - There are Windows, Mac and UNIX versions of this document. It covers installation, starting and stopping the product, the user interface, and how to perform the most basic operations.
• User's Guide - This will be the most frequently referenced manual during the early learning stages. It provides an overview of the entire product, with pointers to in-depth information.
• Reference Manual [multi-volume set] - This is the encyclopedic reference to all features and is organized alphabetically, with a detailed index for fine-grained searches.
• Programming Reference Manual - This guide is intended for users who are writing Stata programming or statistical extensions. It presumes an advanced knowledge of Stata and programming concepts.
• Graphics Manual - This guide covers production of various types of graphs, control of attributes, printing and management of images in various formats.

FAQs, Tutorials and NetCourses

The corporate FAQs and tutorials section is comprehensive. The Official Stata Technical-Support FAQs are authoritative and current. The user-generated, tutorial information is of varying quality and currency. Many tutorials are computing context specific, so must be filtered for appropriateness.

• The Jeroen Wessie introduction is thorough, with a statistical focus.
• The materials from UCLA consist of a searchable portal, with links to many sites, and a well-organized set of learning resources.
• The Carolina Population Center at UNC Chapel Hill maintains a data management guide and a lengthy comparison of Stata and SAS code. This latter document is touted as a guide for SAS programmers learning Stata, but is equally useful for moving the other direction.

Within the Stata application itself are included tutorials on various topics. Type the command tutorial to obtain a list of the available tutorials and instructions on how to invoke particular ones.

For those seeking a structured learning approach with instructor feedback, Stata offers fee-based, NetCourses that are taken over the Internet. These courses run for several weeks with one lecture posted each week. The typical time commitment required is 5 hours per week.

Program Code

New feature development in Stata is premised in part upon extensible code developed by statistical practitioners using the product. Links are provided to primary code development sites from which programs can be downloaded. The most important R&D advances are incorporated into the official Stata code base and released as periodic, downloadable updates announced through the Stata Technical Bulletin.

Textbooks, Utilities and Services

Assorted other resources include compilations of Stata examples into online textbooks and miscellaneous tools and services for adding functionality to the product. The Stata Journal is a peer-reviewed, quarterly that publishes more formal articles on Stata topics.