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Re: st: To STATA experts - BOOK
At 08:30 2007-09-13, you wrote:
... never seen a set of books
without an index or page numbers. And, I mean an index like "<topic>
on page X",
not just point to a book.
I agree that Stata manuals are the only place I've seen this
arrangement. However, it seems to me to work fairly well (navigating
Graphics in version 8 is confusing, but the finding my way through
the rest has been pretty straight forward).
...stata site are truly statistical
in nature, many of them are quite easily answered if you either have
had the problem
before or are so experienced in the product that you just 'know' the
answer. In short,
while it is true that people do NOT read manuals, perhaps it's the
fault of the docs
which cause many of the problems (see above comment).
... Stata documentation would be significantly better. Perhaps Stata
writers should look
at any set of IBM technical docs to see what I mean.
I also agree with you that IBM typically has some of the best
documentation. However, I've found that where I understand the
underlying statistics, Stata documentation is clear and concise. By
that, I mean that I've been able to site down with the documentation
and figure out what I need to type in a matter of minutes to about an
hour. Perhaps I've been conditioned by Microsoft and the SAS
Institute to think this is efficient enough.
On the whole, I have often said that one of the reasons that I use
Stata rather than other statistical packages with which I am familiar
is that the documentation good.
Brad
Brad De Groot, D.V.M., Ph.D.
Stockman's Veterinary Clinic Livestock Information Services
3666 Stockman Road P.O. Box 652
North Platte NE 69101 North Platte NE 69103
308 532 7210 308 660 1773
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