Learning Resources for Mata

[Saeed Sardar]

While Stata is rich in learning resources, Mata is relatively poor. There are random materials here and there on Mata, but the number of documents, blog posts, videos, and lecture materials on Mata are not pretty much scarce as compared to Stata. Can someone refer me to good materials from where beginners can take a systematic start in learning Mata, or possibly senior members of this group can share their experiences of how they learnt Mata.

[Sergio Correia]

Not comprehensive, but should be a decent starting point:

• Mata Matters: A series of articles in Stata Journal. EG: http://www.stata-journal.com/article...article=pr0050 , an incomplete list here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?u...ar.google.com/
• Mata, the missing manual: http://www.stata.com/meeting/chicago...hi11_gould.pdf
• The source code for moremata (ssc install moremata). Also, the source of most Mata functions from Statacorp is available within the help files (at the very end of the help files)
• Give at least a glance to the Mata reference manual to see what functions are out there
• The Stata blog: http://blog.stata.com/tag/mata/ (also see older entries at the bottom)

That said, I think it's an under-studied subject, given its great usefulness.

[Christophe Kolodziejczyk]

The chapters about Mata in Kit Baum's introduction to Stata programming. There is also a chapter in Microeconometrics using Stata by Cameron and Trivedi. Both books are in Stata Press.
I think a place to start is chapter 0, 1 and 2 from the manual. It's rather dry and the pay-off is great IMHO.

Bill Gould has a talk about Mata. It is in Stata's markup language smcl and it is downloadable from SSC. It's rather old (2005), but I found it very good.

Mata is a programming language, so in order to learn it, I had to practice it (a lot) by trying to solve small problems and then bigger problems. It is also a good idea to cover as many aspects of the language as possible by making examples (Operators, types, subscripting, manipulation of strings, I/O and the diverse numerical tools Mata offers).

See also these old posts

http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...ning-resources
http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...amming-in-mata

And I agree with Sergio Correia last remark

[Mark Wain]

There are lots of materials about Mata over the internet. Lots of documents, blog, videos. Just type learn MATA in google there will be lots of resources. I'm not sure if I can add links as new memeber, but like I said just type in google "learm MATA". I hope this post was usefull as well