Re: st: Upcoming NetCourses

[Maarten buis <maartenbuis@yahoo.co.uk>]

--- On Wed, 8/9/10, Mark Nichols wrote:
> I have examined the material and in my opinion not really
> worth your time or money. 

That has not been my experience. I took the introduction to
Stata programming a couple of years ago. I found that there
were two main advantages of these courses: 1) it shaped the
way I set up an analysis, organize my .do-files, avoid 
certain practices that would make it hard to reproduce my
analysis, etc. 2) Lots and lots and lots of neat little 
tricks that make my (Stata) live so much easier.

> If you can't or don't like to figure out things on your
> own, then the netcourses might be just the thing for you.

The problem with figuring things out on your own is that that 
way you can easily get stuck with some bad habits. Learning
from other people who have been where you are now is so much 
more productive. If you want to learn on your own, you can 
now also aquire good habits and tricks from this book: 

J. Scott Long (2009) "The Workflow of Data Analysis Using 
Stata". College Station, TX: Stata Press.
<http://stata-press.com/books/wdaus.html>

Hope this helps,
Maarten

--------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany

http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------


      

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