Customer Reviews

A Gentle Introduction to Stata

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the book I have been waiting for! It assumes no prior knowledge of STATA and goes step-by-step through practical exercises that a person handling data would need to do in everyday work. This book would have helped me a ton during my graduate courses, as I did not have any formal introduction to STATA and pieced together commands from various books and websites. Thank you, Alan Acock and STATA Press, for recognizing that not everyone is innately adept at programming. If you are a beginner or find yourself spinning your wheels with commands, this book is what you need.

As a PhD student,I found this book quite usefull.This book is great and easy to read.It gives you as much as you need in shortest time.If you don't have enough experince using statistical softwares such as R or SAS or any other advanced packages this book would be very helpful.

Indispensible adjunct to my biostat classes where the professors never have time to teach stata but expect us to use it for assignments. The examples used are easy to understand. There are brief explanation on the abbreviations of commands. More than a technical book on stata commands, the explanation on statiscal tests are very helpful for beginners.

I taught the second semester of multivariate statistics to graduate students at our school of social work. Although graduate level, most of our students have very rudimentary at best statistical skills so the second semester began with linear regressions. I decided to introduce them to Stata so that they would have experience with at least a second statistical package - most know SPSS - and learn about the usefulness of this program. I selected Dr. Acock's book as a good way of getting them to learn how to use Stata in as painless a way as possible. The book fit the bill perfectly. It is written very clearly and walks you through many of the basics of Stata and provides good tips on post-estimation, a few tricks here and there, and a bit of humor.

Students who already know Stata or who have an advanced knowledge of statistics would not find this book that useful but for beginning courses and students, it is pitched just right. Now, if I only had a companion volume that walked through more advanced regression models in a similar way, I would have my texts for the class and could put to rest the venerable Tabachnick and Fidell text, which was perfect in its day but has become dated. I understand Dr. Acock is at work on such a volume and I will definitely have a look before launching into the course again in 2012.

Had extensive experience with other programming (C#, VB, ASP.NET, SQL, Perl) languages as well as SAS. The material in this book provides an easy transition from any of those to Stata.