STATA Boot Camp?

[Brady Rocks]

Hello Statalist,

I was wondering if anyone knew of any stata boot camps where one could immerse themselves in the software and master the language in a condensed amount of time. I've seen similar bootcamps for data scientist that use R, but was curious if similar options existed for stata.

Any insights are greatly appreciated.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Bootcamps are probably a necessity for R, since, [imho] there will hardly be any volunteers wishing to subject themselves to torture-by-R willingly.

With Stata you can simply read a good book and be up to speed over a weekend. Which book - depends on what you want to learn.
If you don't know or don't care, get a J.Scott Long's book "The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata" - a bit of everything for a curious mind.

As with anything serious, don't expect that you will absorb the 10,000 pages of Stata's documentation over the weekend. But you can cover a good deal of Chuck Huber's videos over the same time and get a sense of the capabilities of the software, then just volunteer yourself for your regional stats office and you will get tons of practical experience.






Images by Stew Smith and Reece Lodder linked without permission, but with good humor.

[Nick Cox]

@Brady Rocks: sympathies on the surname, which must have provoked a lot of poor jokes over the years from people like me who love wordplay. OTOH, Brady rocks? If so, please note our request for full real names.

More crucially, I sympathise also with the aim to "master the language in a condensed amount of time", but much hinges on what exactly that means. For example, do you expect to write original programs or are you imagining fairly routine operations? Even with the later, the nitty-gritty of data management with any substantial dataset can be surprisingly challenging, long before you get to graphics or statistics.

Also, you've been on Statalist since February, so is your current level still zero? What do you wish to learn next, because that is the most vital question?

I first learned Stata (https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#spelling contains lesson #1) from Larry Hamilton's Statistics with Stata in its 1990 first edition. That was, and is, a concise, lucid and positive book. About 20 years later I got to meet him and thank him in person. The latest version https://www.stata.com/bookstore/statistics-with-stata/ is not completely up-to-date, but that does not matter much: there wouldn't be much to unlearn and you may able to find a copy cheaply. Alan Acock's book https://www.stata.com/bookstore/gent...tion-to-stata/ occupies the same fine niche, but you would probably have to pay more.

But my recommendations otherwise are all free:

The Getting Started volume for your operating system is included with your Stata and accessible at (e.g.) https://www.stata.com/manuals/gsw.pdf

The User's Manual is included with your Stata and accessible at https://www.stata.com/manuals/u.pdf I can't think of a better way to learn Stata seriously than reading as far into that as you need, noting that you probably won't (need to) finish it; it is as or more important to know that the later chapters exist so that you can go back to them as needed.

As an Editor of the Stata Journal, and an occasional contributor, I would be remiss in not underlining that it contains a great deal of tutorial and expository material, mostly free of access (stuff within the last 3 years requires subscription access, but your institution may subscribe).

I've spent a lot of time trying to teach Stata. The extent to which that works depends largely on how far people get enough confidence to start teaching themselves.

Trying to reverse roles, and wondering how i could learn (say) R seriously -- I am no more than an occasional user, and forget much of what I ever use -- I wouldn't try to watch videos, which seem to me best treated as answering very specific questions. I would find a book at the right level for me and spend a lot of time typing in commands and trying to apply them to my own data.

[Sebastian Kripfganz]

There is a Stata Summer School coming up in July:
Stata Summer School