Customer Reviews

A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics, Second Edition

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Stata's graphical facilities have become much more powerful over the years, and with power comes complexity. Michael Mitchell's VISUAL GUIDE TO STATA GRAPHICS does not attempt to tame the complexity; rather, it artfully displays it. This is not a traditional how-to manual; StataCorp already produces one. Instead, it's a very detailed catalog, showing the complete variety of standard Stata graphs, along with the code or menu options (including instructions on how to use the built-in Graphics editor) required to create them. It also quite elegantly displays many of the graphical variants that can be created with common and not-so-common options.

Despite having used Stata for years (since 1995 or so), until very recently I had never created anything more complicated than a simple histogram or scatterplot. When I needed more complex graphics for a presentation earlier this year, I picked up a copy of this book. I found it helpful but limited. The color-coded page edges (visible with the book closed) and the detailed index often -- but not always -- helped me find what I was looking for. The demonstrations of specific options were indispensable.

Probably the biggest limitation of the book is that it covers standard Stata commands only. There are many widely-used, easily-available user-created commands that fill in significant gaps in Stata's graphical repertoire. This omission is understandable and forgivable, but it is still disappointing.

The most important thing for the buyer to be aware of is that book does not provide guidance about how to select graphical displays for particular purposes. Furthermore, it does not provide a tour through each kind of graph, talking about where such a graph might be appropriate or how it should be interpreted. Finally, it does not discuss how to collapse, reshape, or recode your data in order to create the graph you want, even though these steps are often required. This is a reference book, not a traditional textbook. It is assumed that the user knows what he/she wants to do and merely needs to be reminded how to do it.

P.S. Full disclosure: Michael Mitchell once turned me down for a job. I don't hold it against him; I wouldn't have hired me either for that job at that particular time.

P.P.S. This book is current through Stata 10, but Stata 11 will probably have been released by the time you read this. The graphics capabilities of Stata 11 are significantly enhanced relative to Stata 10. I'm sure that Michael Mitchell is hard at work at an updated version of the book; if you're likely to upgrade to Stata 11 in the very near future, you might want to wait.

Stata is capable of doing complex and beautiful graphs. But, despite the graph editor that became available in recent versions, it may be quite complicated to get exactly what you have in mind. This book, full of different types of graphs, is an invaluable help. The chapter structure is very clever, making is easy to find the exact detail you need. And, of course, browsing the different graphs is hugely helpful. The book covers virtually all aspects of graph plotting with Stata, from the simple standard options, to the most complex, including graph combining, overlaying, etc. There is also a helpful chapter on the graph editor. It would be impossible to have all answers to everyone's needs in one single book. But, in conjunction with Stata help and manuals, this book makes producing beautiful, cleanly finished graphs a lot easier.