Statistics with STATA: Updated for Version 9

This is by far the best STATA manual you could ever find. It is easy to use, has many helpful examples, and you could pretty much find solutions for any programming issue you need by using this book. Buy it and you won't regret it. Seriously, most books on the market do not even come close to how good this book is. I recommended it to several of my graduate students colleagues and everyone loved it and bought it.

I am an advanced PhD student in economics and use Stata 8 at the moment. I love every page of this book! Although I only owned it for a few months, I think I will need to repurchase the same edition because I over-used this one. The definitions are clear, applications are precise, and readibility is superb! i highly recommend this book if you are intermediate in economics or better. The Stata part I think is for most levels. Very enjoyable!

If you are using Version 9 of Stata, you should be sure to get Version 9 of the book, available from the Stata Corp.

If you are about to become a user of Stata, or if you already have worked with the program for some time, this guide is likely to be of great help! It introduces you to everything from setting up a dataset to engage in programming. It is rich of examples. The book has saved me a lot of time, and it is really a short cut, instead of consulting the reference books. Due to its size (339 pages), it is not a comprehensive guide; you will need to use the help command and the reference material as complements to this guide. It loses its fifth star due to limited coverage and its incomplete index.

Drawn by the usability and features, likely you're considering switching to Stata from SAS, SPSS, LIMDEP, or other similar statistical package. This was the same situation I was facing. I bought this book on a whim, while ordering Stata7. It provides a good overview of Stata's features and tells you the commands for common features you use often with your old stats package. A really nice feature is that each topic shows multiple levels of depth for the focal model. For example the section on multiple regression starts with the OLS command, but on the same "2 pages for quick overview" shows a dozen or so of the more advanced commands you're likely to need for incremental regression analysis, 1-way effects, 2-way x-section time-series regresions and others. A very useful structure... which allows the reader to see the tree of related commands on 2-pages for each topic.It's a nice substitute (and even a compliment) for a collegue who already knows Stata. You're unlikely to be using this book for more than a week initially, but may refer back to it before opening the Stata User's Guide when starting a new project that requires a method that you haven't yet used in Stata.