You will find an amazing variety of SPSS stuff on the Internet, from specific programming to general commentary. Even humor. The following two Web sites are dedicated to SPSS and statistics jokes:

www.ilstu.edu/%7egcramsey/Gallery.html
www.kingdouglas.com/SPSS/DiverseCultures/Humor.htm

The Web site of the SPSS company, from which you can find articles, programs, add-ons, and general news about SPSS, can be located by pointing your Web browser to the following address:

www.spss.com

Another way to get to the same Web site is to use the menus of SPSS and choose Help

From this base Web site, you can locate the SPSS home page for 34 countries other than the United States. This page allows you to specify a search string so you can locate the article, training service, or detailed description of whatever you want. The Web site is quite large and will probably contain some information about whatever it is you are trying to research, whether it's about the company SPSS, statistics in general, or SPSS in particular.

Whether you want to write SPSS programs or become otherwise knowledgeable about the workings of SPSS, you will need to check out the developer center. It has information on all sorts of SPSS operations. You can find the center here:

www.spss.com/devcentral/

You can use your Web browser to go directly to this site, or you can use the menu on the main window of SPSS and choose Help

You can download utility programs already written and ready to go, graphics examples, new statistical modules, and articles on the inner workings of SPSS technology.

SPSS has forums where you can interact with people inside the SPSS company and with other SPSS users. If you have a question or a problem, this Web site is a good place to take it.

SPSS has experts and experienced users, and a lot of them are ready to answer questions. If you have a question, don't just sit there with a giant question mark floating over your head, check out these sites:

www.spssusers.co.uk/
www.spsslog.com/

A surprisingly large number of mailing lists are based on statistics. If you want, you can join a mailing list and receive copies of the ongoing discussions. You need not make your presence known until you have a question or have something to contribute. You can choose from among the mailing lists at the following sites:

The following is a newsgroup frequented by SPSS users:

comp.soft-sys.stat.spss

To take a look at examples of newsgroup postings, you can read the archived articles at the following location:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.stat.spss

For statistics in general, three newsgroups exist. Following are the name and URL for the archived Web site of each one. You can look at the archives at these sites and get an idea of the type and frequency of posts:

This book gives you a small peek at the things you can do with Python. Although Python is a language built into SPSS, it's much more than that — even more than you will ever need for purely SPSS purposes. Python is a general-purpose programming language on the order of C or Java — that is, you can use it to do anything you might ever want to do with a computer.

And it runs almost anywhere. You will find versions of Python for Linux, Windows, Apple, and even cell phones. That's right. You can probably use it to program your cell phone.

If you want to go further into Python, there is no better place to start than the Python Language Web site. Lots of stuff is there, but two things are of prime importance: complete documentation (tutorials, examples, and more) and a free copy of Python that you can download and install on your machine:

www.python.org

Quite often, newcomers to programming find themselves put off by the geeky terms used to describe a programming language. Don't be. It's a lot easier to understand the fundamentals of programming than it is to understand statistics; it's just that nerds like to show off by talking that way. (I should know. I've spent my life in the company of nerds.)

The Python Web site is friendlier than most of its kind; it's an excellent place to start learning programming. Programming is a pretty good hobby, but it can be habit forming. Be careful — you can find yourself getting hooked, and before you know it, you're on the road to becoming a nerd.

The following Web sites are helpful when you're programming Python within SPSS:

You can find programs and programming tutorials for the various SPSS languages. All the Web sites listed here concern themselves with programming SPSS. Most have commentary and suggestions along with programs, some are tutorials on programming, and some have programs that you can download and use.

Syntax language:

Scripts (Sax BASIC):

General SPSS programming:

One of the things the Web does very well is present tutorials. In fact, that's the sort of thing it was originally designed to do — instead of the advertising and marketing tool that it has become. This section contains a short list of tutorial Web sites, but there are certainly more. Some of the sites are for statistics, some are for SPSS, and some are for both.

If you're looking for a tutorial, you'll probably need to search through several of these sites to find the one you want to start with. Some are better than others. They all emphasize certain characteristics and capabilities of the software. Some specialize in statistics for a particular subject, which may or may not be to your advantage. Some were designed using older versions of the software, but the capabilities of SPSS have expanded, not contracted, so those lessons should still be valid.

This list is only a small percentage of the total. These are mostly for general-purpose studies, but some sites become specific in the types of statistics they present. If you wanted to narrow your search to say, medical statistics, you could enter the search string SPSS tutorial medical or PASW tutorial medical to turn up a number of specialized sites.

SPSS tutorials:

General statistics tutorials:

A wiki is a Web site with documents that are constantly updated. You can join as a reader and as a contributor. The SPSS wiki acts both as a reference source and as a workbook for SPSS statistical procedures. It can be used equally well by both novices and experts.

Instructions on the Web page tell you how to use the wiki to find what you're looking for — and how to contribute to the constantly growing body of information. You will find the SPSS wiki at the following location:

http://spss.wikia.com

You have probably heard of the Free Software Foundation and GNU. The members are involved in developing open-source software (to me and you, that translates into both "free of charge" and "free to modify"). The PSPP project is developing a SPSS workalike. It's not possible for me to say how much has been finished and tested, because that changes almost daily, but claims are being made that it supports a large subset of SPSS. Its statistical procedure support is limited but growing.

I'm not recommending it, but I'm not pooh-poohing it either. If you're interested, you can download a copy and try it for yourself. It can be downloaded in different ways and installed in different forms. You can find out all about how to do that at this Web site:

www.gnu.org/software/pspp/

You can get the latest stable version or you can get a copy of the current version while it's under development. I recommend that you get the latest stable version, at least to begin with, unless you are either a programmer or love surprises.

Besides the normal descriptive text found on the Web site, you will find e-mail addresses and IRC channels for discussions and support. You can register to be notified of future releases.