A last concern for (at least some) graduate students is updates and add
ons. This is not manual related.
I don't know what stata can do about it, but administrators make the
Stata folder and the ado folder non user-writable and it looks like
there is no way of convincing them to type -update all- -update swap-
with the result that we are still using the version out of the CD.
I just found out that it is possible to add ado paths. I'll look into
this more, but I truly hope it is possible to download ado files to the
added path.
I would add two comments to Renzo's discussion of documentation, and
the difficulties grad students (who may not be able to purchase the
full doc set) may have. First, I think Bill Gould's proposal to
considerably enhance the SMCL on-line help would be a very good idea.
It will still leave the technical details -- the mathematics underlying
the estimator, for instance -- only in the manuals, but if all other
information could be placed on line (e.g. definitions of what is
returned by each command) that would be most useful. Second, it is
unfortunate that some key information is relegated to the Programming
manual. Although I am sympathetic to Stata Corp's concerns for
providing usable and portable documentation, most graduate students
will not be using Stata efficiently if they do not know about
-foreach-, -forvalues-, local macros, and matrices (not necessarily to
do linear algebra, but to store and organize results for tabulation,
etc.). Here again, better on-line help would perhaps close that gap.
But fact of the matter is that not only the Users Guide and Ref Manual
are needed to use Stata effectively.
