Re: st: RE: I wish I'd known that -

[Austin Nichols <austinnichols@gmail.com>]

David Elliott <dcelliott@gmail.com>:
Thanks for pointing out
[ http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?contents_should_know ]
--I hadn't seen it before.

But I honestly can't believe that -do-, -findit-, -local-, -by-,
-levelsof-, -foreach-, -svy-, -mi-, -graph- and -twoway- are not on
that list.  It also should link to
http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?comments
and
http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?functions
and
http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?estcom
and
http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?subscripting
and
http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?tsvarlist
at minimum.  I.e. since it has some data manipulation commands on
there, it should also tell you how to put them in a do file with some
comments.

My own intranet Stata page says, among other things:

The User's Guide is a good place to start, and is now available in PDF
format, linked from the help files; for example, if you type help
estcom in Stata, one of the top lines in the help file is a link to
[U] 20 Estimation and postestimation commands (an article in the
User's Guide). Also required reading for all Stata users:

* Article on by [ http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.html?articlenum=pr0004 ]
* Article on foreach [
http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.html?articlenum=pr0005 ]

If you want to see what's going on inside a foreach loop, you can set
trace on and set tracedepth 1.

If you're looking for a graphics command, a good place to start is the
catalog of graphs on the Stata website [
http://stata.com/support/faqs/graphics/gph/statagraphs.html ], with
commands needed to reproduce each graph shown directly below the graph
output.

[etc.]


On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 4:01 PM, David Elliott <dcelliott@gmail.com> wrote:
> A great place to start is with Stata's own suggestion list: -help
> contents_should_know-
>
> I created (well, more like got halfway done but never finished) a
> Stata helpfile for our networked Stata that has a link that is created
> by a reference in profile.do and printed to the console on startup
> displaying: "An introduction to Stata is available.  Just -click here-
> to view it."
> This is especially useful for new users and I would encourage you to
> consider writing your course, or at least labs, in SMCL so that users
> can run code examples, access command help and supplementary info all
> from within the Stata interface.
>
> DC Elliott

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