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Re: st: To STATA experts - BOOK


From   Brad De Groot <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: To STATA experts - BOOK
Date   Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:24:50 -0500

At 08:30 2007-09-13, you wrote:
... never seen a set of books
without an index or page numbers. And, I mean an index like "<topic> on page X",
not just point to a book.
I agree that Stata manuals are the only place I've seen this arrangement. However, it seems to me to work fairly well (navigating Graphics in version 8 is confusing, but the finding my way through the rest has been pretty straight forward).



...stata site are truly statistical
in nature, many of them are quite easily answered if you either have had the problem
before or are so experienced in the product that you just 'know' the answer. In short,
while it is true that people do NOT read manuals, perhaps it's the fault of the docs
which cause many of the problems (see above comment).

... Stata documentation would be significantly better. Perhaps Stata writers should look
at any set of IBM technical docs to see what I mean.

I also agree with you that IBM typically has some of the best documentation. However, I've found that where I understand the underlying statistics, Stata documentation is clear and concise. By that, I mean that I've been able to site down with the documentation and figure out what I need to type in a matter of minutes to about an hour. Perhaps I've been conditioned by Microsoft and the SAS Institute to think this is efficient enough.

On the whole, I have often said that one of the reasons that I use Stata rather than other statistical packages with which I am familiar is that the documentation good.

Brad



Brad De Groot, D.V.M., Ph.D.

Stockman's Veterinary Clinic Livestock Information Services
3666 Stockman Road P.O. Box 652
North Platte NE 69101 North Platte NE 69103
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