12.1 Online sources and manuals

• – Statalist.org is the official Stata forum and usually offers the best advice when you have very special questions about Stata. Expert users and Stata employees will deal with your requests. When you use complex designs or methods and want to learn more about the details, this is the first place to go.
• – Reddit.com/r/Stata is the Stata subforum on Reddit, and also highly popular. This seems like the perfect place for beginners who want to find typos in their commands, and need general help for questions that might have been asked before.
• – Talkstats.com is mainly focused on general advice when it comes to statistics but also includes a Stata subforum.
• – Stata Manual: every Stata installation comes with a tremendous documentation, which you can access either directly inside Stata (see page 23) or as PDFs which are saved on the computer. These manuals are sorted by topic, so you can browse freely and see which commands might be interesting for you.
• – Statabook.com, the website of this book, also provides more material online, like do-files that contain additional information, and exemplary seminar papers that show, in-depth how the process of writing an empirical paper works.

12.2 Books

There are plenty of great books about Stata. I only want to introduce a few which might be interesting for the beginner.

• – Kohler and Kreuter (2012): this is actually the book for the motivated beginner. The authors give a profound and in-depth presentation of how to use Stata, and furthermore, introduce the basic concepts of statistics. If you read the current book, as an absolute beginner, and want to get more information, this is clearly the next book you should pick up.
• – Acock (2014): the structure of this book closely resembles the one of Kohler and Kreuter, and offers the interested beginner a more in-depth explanation of all tools and functions, starting with basic data management, and exploring more advanced methods. Whether you choose this one, or the one listed before, is up to you.
• – Hamilton (2013): this book also offers an introduction to general themes like data management and visualizing, but mostly works as a grand-tour of the long list of methods Stata provides. Many kinds of regressions, survival analysis, event-history design and multilevel models are covered, as well as many more. While not offering a large theoretical introduction to each method, which would clearly go beyond its scope, the explanations are understandable, even for the beginner. This book is ideal in combination with an introductory course in methods, or just for browsing and exploring Stata’s vast possibilities.
• – Mehmetoglu and Jakobsen (2017): this quite recent work comes for students in a hurry, who have to work with advanced methods. While the introduction to the general Stata workflow is quite short, it offers applied knowledge and examples for basic regression models, and also more advanced techniques, like working with panel data. It is similar to the work of Hamilton, but much shorter and with a smaller scope.
• – Long (2009): this is not a general introduction to Stata, but mostly deals with data management and organization. When you are not focused on direct ­application, but want to learn how you can structure your entire workflow around Stata, maybe for larger projects like a Ph.D. or your research career, then this book is for you.