--- Newson, Roger B wrote:
> These hardcopy manuals are mentioned in the online help, are
> advertised at
> http://www.stata.com/bookstore/documentation.html
> and are probably a worthwhile investment if Ana does not have any at
> present.
These are indeed very very useful, and no serious Stata user can do
without them. However they are expensive and not everyone in your
department may need his own copy. The trick is to convince your
department that the department needs a full doc-set and that the
logical place to store them is your office since you use it the most
and since you are the resident Stata guru. That scam worked for me.
But seriously, it is a good idea to share the use and the costs of a
full doc-set with others.
If you are sharing with people who are just a bit too far away you
can use an older manual. For instance my department is split over two
floors, and the Stata 8 manual is located on the other floor. This will
answer 90% of their questions. At home I even have a Stata 6 manual,
but that is getting annoyingly old.
> I think they prefer not to have them on their website in .pdf
> format because they make a lot of their money selling the hardcopy
> manuals to serious users who want to read the formulas and other
> important details.
This also represents a major investment by StataCorp. Consider the
free competitor of Stata, R. The documentation is as sparse and often
sparser then the online help files of Stata. There are lots of free
getting started texts out there for R, as there are for Stata (e.g.
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/ ), but beyond that you will have
to hope that the author of the program you are interested in has
written a book accompanying the package and buy it. Programming is
just much more fun then writing documentation.
Maarten
-----------------------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Department of Social Research Methodology
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Boelelaan 1081
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
visiting address:
Buitenveldertselaan 3 (Metropolitan), room Z434
+31 20 5986715
http://home.fsw.vu.nl/m.buis/
-----------------------------------------
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