I gave a 1.5 hour talk on Mata at the 2010 UK Stata Users Group Meeting in September. The slides are available in pdf form here. The talk was well received, which of course pleased me. If you’re interested in Mata, I predict you will find the slides useful even if you didn’t attend the meeting.

The problem with the Mata Reference Manual is that, even though it tells you all the details, it never tells you how to put it all together, nor does it motivate you. We developers at StataCorp love the manual for just that reason: It gets right to the details that are so easy to forget.

Anyway, in outline, the talk and slides work like this

1. They start with the mechanics of including Mata code. It begins gently, at the end of Stata’s NetCourse 151, and ends up discussing big — really big — systems.
2. Next is a section on appropriate and inappropriate use of Mata.
3. That’s followed by Mata concepts, from basic to advanced.
4. And the talk includes a section on debugging!

I was nervous about how the talk would be received before I gave it. It’s been on my to-do list to write a book on Mata, but I never really found a way to approach the subject. The problem is that it’s all so obvious to me that I tend to launch immediately into tedious details. I wrote drafts of a few chapters more than once, and even I didn’t want to reread them.

I don’t know why this overview approach didn’t occur to me earlier. My excuse is that it’s a strange (I claim novel) combination of basic and advanced material, but it seems to work. I titled the talk “missing manual” with the implied promise that I would write that book if the talk was well received. It was. Nowadays, I’m not promising when. Real Soon Now.

The materials for all the talks, not just mine, are available at the SSC(*) and on www.stata.com. For the UK 2010, go to http://ideas.repec.org/s/boc/usug10.html or http://www.stata.com/meeting/uk10/abstracts.html. For other User Group Meetings, it’s easiest to start at the Stata page Meeting Proceedings.

If you have questions on the material, the appropriate place to post them is Statalist. I’m a member and am likely to reply, and that way, others who might be interested get to see the exchange, too. Please use “Mata missing manual” as the subject so that it will be easy for nonmembers to search the Statalist Archives and find the thread.

Finally, my “Stata, the missing manual” talk has no connection with the fine Missing-Manual series, “the book that should have been in the box”, created by Pogue Press and O’Reilly Media, whose website is http://missingmanuals.com/.

* The SSC is the Statistical Software Components archive, often called the Boston College Archive, provided by http://www.repec.org/. The SSC has become the premier Stata download site for user-written software on the Internet and also archives proceedings of Stata Users Group meetings and conferences.