Stata 10 Base Reference Manual

[Michael Massmann]

Dear all,

I am looking for Volume 2 (I - P) of the Stata 10 Base Reference Manual. There seems to be an online version of Volume 1 and Volume 3 on https://archive.org/ but not of Volume 2.

In particular, I am interested in reading Volume 2's pages 401-421 on nl and nl postestimation, see the table of contents in Volume 1.

Can anyone help?

Regards,
Michael

[Nick Cox]

If it helps, the oldest manuals that are online and universally accessible appear to be those for Stata 13.

[Michael Massmann]

Thanks, Nick. Do you happen to have a link for the Version 13 manuals?

[Nick Cox]

Googling

stata manuals 13 pdf

works for me.

[Michael Massmann]

Thanks again, Nick. Googling indeed yields links that point to the Stata website. So for instance https://www.stata.com/manuals13/u.pdf or https://www.stata.com/manuals15/r.pdf. I could not find the old manuals hyperlinked via https://www.stata.com/links/ or https://www.stata.com/features/documentation/ although I believe that would be a worthy feature.

Regarding Volume 2 of the Stata 10 Base Reference Manual, however, does anyone have a pdf copy that he/she could share, short of a version on the internet? That would be greatly appreciated.

[Nick Cox]

StataCorp went from printing manuals (only) to supplying .pdf (only) with a transition with both modes available. I imagine they saw little point in retrospectively posting .pdf versions of older manuals. Someone did once scan in the manual for version 1 but that too seems to have disappeared.

Sorry, but althouugh I was a user of Stata 10 (I started on Stata 2.05), both print and pdf versions for 10 have long since disappeared so far as I am concerned, but you may be luckier with another long-term user.

[Richard Williams]

First off I do have the original 1984 Stata Reference manual (I got it from UCLA) if anyone wants it:

https://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/stata/...enceManual.pdf

I like to point out that anyone who writes STATA rather than Stata is obviously an old-fashioned long-time user because it was spelled STATA in the original manual. (Also, I just noticed that it never says Stata 1, which makes sense since they didn't know then if there would ever be a version 2.)

I also have Stata 10 still available on my machine. Would the online help meet your needs? The online help is good if all you need is syntax. There are a lot of post-estimation commands -- is there one in particular you want to know about?

It would be nice if all those old manuals were around. Because of version control, Stata actually has lots and lots of undocumented commands, e.g. the syntax for some command back in version 5. If you are looking at a command written long ago it may be difficult to figure out what the syntax means.

[Michael Massmann]

Dear Richard, many thanks for your response.

The reason why I am interested in the Stata 10 documentation is that I am trying to understand what the

nl

command does in someone's code whose first line is

version 10.1

Given the documentation in

. help version

I presume this means that, effectively, the Stata 10 interpreter is run. Given the amount of detail on

nl

in the Stata17 online help, however, I am unsure whether the online documentation of Stata 10 would suffice.

Having said this, I tried the

. help whatsnewXXtoYY

commands and could not find any indication that the definition of

nl

might have changed since Stata 10. So might the pdf help of my Stata 17 contain all applicable information after all?

Do you have any thoughts on this?

[Richard Williams]

I don't see any obvious changes to nl since version 10 either. My guess is the Stata 17 docs will be fine for you, but I can't guarantee it.