Free books on Stata programming

[Alex Taylor]

Hi all,

Can anyone recommend free books that provide an introduction to programming with Stata, something along the lines of Christopher Baum's An Introduction to Stata Programming? There are lots of fantastic free resources for learning open source languages but I'm really struggling to find much for Stata.

My question is similar to this one, the distinction being that I'm looking for free books/resources. https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...recommendation

Thanks in advance.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

I've not encountered any good books that are also (legally) free. The two do not often coincide in my experience. The manuals that are included with Stata, however, provide excellent documentation to get started and are well-written.

There are many books available through Stata Press that might serve you as an introductory text, and are reasonably priced, in my opinion.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

https://www.google.com/search?q=stata+press&tbm=bks
your mileage may vary depending on the country. These webpages explicitly mention the credit, that they are displayed by permission of Stata Press:

Even though you don't get full content, the material in these books is much more accessible for a newbie. If you need a comprehensive documentation - the PDFs that come with Stata are superb.

[Nick Cox]

I started by reading the manuals, principally [U] and later [P], and looking at working code that did more or less what I wanted. I still read the manuals and look at working code.

Kit Baum's book is excellent, but that is not the question as it's not free. .

A shout-out to Larry Hamilton's book on Stata, which went through eight editions from 1990 and was the first book on Stata. None of my copies ever came back from the people who borrowed them!

Somewhere inside was code for row-wise median of 3 variables

gen wanted = x1 + x2 + x3 - max(x1, x2, x3) - min(x1, x2, x3)

which does fall over given missings, but is still droll in my mind.

Personal prejudice: Get really comfortable with do-files first. A program should be general and define a command that you imagine you want to use repeatedly. The first few programs can be hard work. because there is quite a lot to learn at once.

[Alex Taylor]

Thanks all. Disappointing though. I had hoped there was something out there that I had just missed.

[Bjarte Aagnes]

https://www.stata.com/manuals/u18.pd...ogrammingStata
Speaking Stata: How to move step by: step

https://data.princeton.edu/stata/programming
http://www.maartenbuis.nl/workshops/.../stata_l2.html
https://blog.stata.com/2016/01/15/pr...osted-entries/

[Nick Cox]

#5 Even in the R community the vast majority of books have to be bought with money and yield an income to the authors, Springer, CRC Press, and so on.

Bjarte Aagnes kindly flagged a Speaking Stata column, and there are others.

[Bruce Weaver]

Hi Alex. I don't think there are any books per se, but my Stata page has links to text-based tutorials in one section and links to course notes etc. in another section. Perhaps you'll find something suitable there. HTH.

[edonavot]

Not books per se but there are many, many resources online.

Asjad Naqvi, an economist, has an excellent Stata Guide.

The UCLA Advanced Research Computing center has many, many examples of code and data analysis which are very valuable.

The Social Science Computing Cooperative at UW-Madison also has a great series of tutorials on Stata.

I'm sure there are more but these are very good places to get started. Following the sentiments of others, I hope that once you've decided whether you'll commit to Stata and have the means, you'll choose to purchase some books in the future.

Good luck.